Israeli Companies Plan to Take 'One Small Step' by Early 2019
State-run Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. and non-profit SpaceIL announced plans to launch a lunar mission in December, putting Israel on track to become the fourth country to land on the moon.
The unmanned, $88 million Israeli spacecraft will blast off on a Falcon 9 rocket made by Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. At 600 kilograms (1,320 pounds), it will be the smallest spaceship so far to make a lunar landing. Its two-month journey will start from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
"I am filled with pride that the first Israeli spacecraft, which is in its final construction and testing phases, will soon be making its way to the moon," said Morris Kahn, SpaceIL president and a founder of Israeli communications and media technology developer Amdocs Ltd.
No government has landed a craft on the moon since the 1970s[*], but interest has revived recently. President Donald Trump has requested almost $900 million in new funding for NASA moon missions. China this year plans to land a probe on the unexplored dark side of the moon, where radio signals from Earth can't be received.
[*] Incorrect. See, for example, China's Chang'e 3 lander and "Jade Rabbit" rover.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bob_super on Wednesday July 11 2018, @07:47AM (10 children)
> become the fourth country to land on the moon
I already count 4: USSR, USA, China, India
And that's weasel words to exclude Europe and Japan, who only orbited. All 6 had also launched using national rockets, rather than only deal with the easiest gravity well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon [wikipedia.org]
Though we can all trust Israel to pass everyone else, given their extensive experience at colonizing unfriendly environments.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday July 11 2018, @11:56AM (7 children)
Landing on the Moon is not the easy thing you present it as. The US, for example, spent roughly $40 million per vehicle for 5 successful lunar orbiters [wikipedia.org] in the 1960s and a bit under $70 million per vehicle for 7 lunar lander [wikipedia.org] missions (of which two failed). In other words, significantly higher costs and mission risk was associated with US efforts to land on the Moon than was associated with orbiting the Moon. And the Moon's gravity well isn't "easiest" because one can't aerobrake and use a dumb parachute to control the last bit of reentry like one can on Earth.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday July 11 2018, @04:36PM (6 children)
The risk was because of the necessity to plan for the unknowns and the PR disaster that minor errors could cause.
The engineering end result is that to land on the moon, stay three days, THEN take off to orbit, with tech from 50 years ago, you need this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module [wikipedia.org]
The best of our current tech, to take off from, then land on Earth, you need this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9 [wikipedia.org] . And that's even cheating, because it lands tanks empty, without its payload, and not ready to take off without external assistance, and it doesn't usually reach orbital speeds (by design).
Landing on the moon is hard, but they figured it out, and in such a tiny package that it fit on top of a rocket. With our current tech, if we lived on the moon, we still could not do a round-trip to Earth.
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Wednesday July 11 2018, @10:13PM
And that's nail-on-the-head the hilarious thing that most people don't actually understand right there.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 12 2018, @03:42AM (4 children)
Which is completely irrelevant to your prior claim that landing on the Moon was so trivial that it was "weasel words" to exclude countries which merely orbited the Moon.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday July 12 2018, @05:06AM (3 children)
I claimed (feel free to read again):
1) that weasel word were used to reduce the number of countries, making the achievement look bigger (Marketing 101)
2) that the moon is the easiest gravity well of the trip. "Easiest" does not mean trivial.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 12 2018, @10:42AM (2 children)
The achievement is considerably bigger. It's dishonest in turn to undermine a potential achievement by including parties who haven't done the achievement.
And as I noted, that's quite irrelevant.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday July 12 2018, @04:14PM (1 child)
Is the achievement bigger than what those two excluded entities have achieved with other bodies: asteroid, comet, other planet's moon ?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 13 2018, @03:55AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @12:17PM
Do you count non-state organisations ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6xJzAYYrX8 [youtube.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @06:08PM
"Though we can all trust Israel to pass everyone else, given their extensive experience at colonizing unfriendly environments."
Sure, migrating in large numbers and then murdering the locals and calling themselves the owners of the place. No other race in history has ever committed so much evil like the israeli khazars do each day.
They are good at murdering/enslaving anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path. DO NOT cooperate with the jew. By cooperating you are enslaving yourself and all future generations. Expose the jewish vermin for what it is: parasites.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @08:07AM
Obligatory YT Link [youtube.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @10:14AM (1 child)
What other basic details does bloomberg get wrong? Maybe if they spent less time and money on having features like infinite scroll the content could be more accurate.
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Wednesday July 11 2018, @06:01PM
The press are always this wrong, it is just on subjects like science and tech the crowd here instantly spots them. Now realize they are just as wrong on every other area they report on. The deliberate lying in #FakeNews is bad but the shocking ignorance and incompetence combined with their arrogance is what makes the modern media a menace to society.
There aren't any editors or fact checkers anymore either. They love to proclaim they still have those things, that it makes them superior to mere bloggers online, but read their output and it becomes clear they aren't even using the spellchecker built into a modern browser most of the time because of the time pressure to be "first to publish." There was a day when English teachers told students to read the New York Times for the canonical example of proper usage, now they publish shocking grammar errors on their front page stories. If they still had grizzled old editors with red pens that sort of nonsense would not be happening. And lets not even discuss the horrid writing that gets published at second tier but still widely trafficked sites like CNN.com.
This article is a good example of the lack of fact checking. This error would not have required an editor calling up sources and verifying quotes, getting second sources, doing government records searches or any of the hard fact checking. It required only a Google search and yet it was published without the most basic checking and the "journalist" won't be punished for being so incompetent as to be an embarrassment to Bloomberg. Although to be fair, clicking her name and looking at her other content for Bloomberg it doesn't look like Science and Technology is her beat, her "expertise" seems to coverage of Israel in general. So she is a Jew covering Jews for a Jew; her profession is "Jew?" (OK, cheap shot, had to take it.)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @11:14AM (1 child)
Great, guys, just frickin great now the muzzies will get up to the moon so they can Free Moonar Paleswine to defeat their centuries old enemies who ruled the land before them who must now be denied the mooooooooon
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @01:25PM
All the better to be closer to their god... [chick.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 11 2018, @06:01PM
The khazar jew buys and sells but makes nothing. The spacecraft design was stolen by the jews and will be launched on rockets they did not design and never will (unless the rocket is carrying deadly explosives and poisons to murder the innocent).
These khazars need to be reminded of their real religion and their origins. They used to live in Georgia and worshiped the phallus (still do). In fact, all jews worship satan (their god) but do not admit to it. Watch the documentary "The Eternal Jew" to get some info on these creatures.
Some assimilate in western cultures (on the surface) and are difficult to spot, like in the case of launching moon orbiters and landers, trying to behave like "westerners". These devil-worshipers are not westerners, and by the way, no one told them that "western" does not equate with "modern" or even "human". The jew imitates his victims using his language and customs (we're jews and we're launching a moon rocket, taking "us" back to the moon after so long). These filthy creatures are not part of "us". We are not them. They will never be us. But they will imitate us.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday July 12 2018, @12:50AM (2 children)
I expected a bunch of fearful Anti Semitic posts from the usual suspects and was not disappointed.
Cowards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 12 2018, @02:54AM (1 child)
Your comment is a waste of bandwidth.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday July 12 2018, @10:17PM
Too frightened to even log in?
Wanker.