Israel’s Beresheet Spacecraft Moon Landing Attempt Appears to End in Crash

[oriolgg]

I was just watching it live, cheering for SpaceIL, it's a pity that the landing was not successful.

I was part of the engineering team of the Japanese team Hakuto of the Google Lunar XPRIZE. I always wondered how it would feel to be in the control room at this time, but our launch deal fell through. I can understand what the SpaceIL engineers are going through right now.

Congratulations to all the SpaceIL team for reaching this far, your work has been impressive. Keep trying and you will make it!

[ronnier]

Maybe not a success this time, but a lot will be learned. These types of failures are now we learn, adapt, and move forward.

[jpindar]

What appears to be the last image the spacecraft managed to send before it crashed:

https://twitter.com/EladRatson/status/1116427960033136640

[pfortuny]

So: first attempt to get to the moon (by them, who are not quite USA or China) and they just fail at the very end.

Like getting a silver medal at the Olympics. Yes, sad. But man!

[hirundo]

With a population of < 3% of the USA, < 1% of China.

[Waterluvian]

The Michael Collins of lunar trips.

[Symmetry]

As they say, space is hard and SpaceIL is hardly the first to have lost a lander.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon

It came tantalizingly close to working, though, and I have high hopes for future attempts. Per aspera ad astra.

[jansan]

Thanks for teaching me a new Latin proverb. I like that very much.

[mrtksn]

It seems that they just got a new word in the dictionary: https://mobile.twitter.com/teamspaceil/status/11163129311033...

I find it a bit irritating to be that cocky when it comes to space technology. Better luck next time!

[oska]

Contrast with Elon Musk saying the next launch of the Falcon Heavy (today) has a 5-10% chance of failure. [1] This is after it has already successfully launched once.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1115998728878321672

[ip26]

Here I was thinking the new dictionary entry was going to be something like:

Beresheet: (v) To fail dramatically after overwhelming confidence

[bluetidepro]

I'm sure/I'd hope the actual engineers on the project wouldn't align to that tweet's wording by the marketing team (aka, they prob wouldn't be that cocky/have phrased it that way themselves).

[ctdonath]

Count your blessings.

They are the 4th country to reach the Moon (albeit at 1km/s).

[_Microft]

Pride comes before a fall. (scnr)

[chrischen]

They successfully crashed it.

[HNthrow22]

This comment thread is both celebratory and hateful, truly disgusting from Hn.

Celebrating space mission failures for any reason is a terrible look.

This is a cultural difference, try to take a step back from your own preconceived cultural norms. What's considered confidence in Israel would qualify as hubris in American culture - there's much less value placed on being humble or soft-spoken in Israeli culture. I make no judgements about if this is better/worse but I certainly wouldn't dream of relishing in their failure even if I perceived them as "cocky".

[jesseab]

It's time to retire the tired old nation-state space-race narrative. We're all in this together people. Their failure is our failure.

[JKCalhoun]

I'll play the contrarian and suggest that a space race is the best kind of national pride. If you're okay with football (soccer) or Olympics pride, this is, in my mind, better still.

And ironaically, as you suggest, when one country wins, we in fact all win.

I would much rather we fight to push back the boundaries of space than to hurl actual bombs at each other.

[brandmeyer]

Nothing could be further from the truth. These folks are fierce with nationalistic and sectarian pride in their vehicle.

https://mobile.twitter.com/teamspaceil/status/11163129311033...

[Medraut]

This! While my sentiment may feel a bit Star Trekky/naive, our quest to get to the stars will only succeed if we, as a planet, pull together. If we dont, we'll be limited to this solar system. China, US, India, Israel, Russia (sorry for anyone else Im missing :-)), are all pioneers and we should celebrate their successes, and continued desire to push the envelope.

[ForrestN]

It’s time to retire the ignorant notion that nation-state space programs can be morally disentangled from the governments pursuing them in no small part for political ends. Their success is the regime’s success.

[outside1234]

We don't cheer for countries practicing Apartheid.

[TomMckenny]

Indeed, and the Israeli project was a new experiment in low cost, volunteer rich space exploration. Its outcome and repetition _is_ significant to everyone. Indeed, nationalistic associations distract from rather than enhance a project.

And we have a few examples of internationalism already like the ISS. And presumably any Mars mission will have to be international. Which is another one of the reasons such projects is worth while.

[moate]

Agree to disagree here. The whole "we're all one people thing" is a great idea and all (I'm a huge fan, would love for the U.N. to be something other than the personification of national relations and instead be a real governing body) but that's not how things work.

This is Israel's project. They had assistance from other organizations/countries, but they're not doing this to better North Korea in any real way and you shouldn't hold North Korean responsible for their failure.

[zymhan]

> On the way down, the main engine cut out. The engine was successfully restarted, but then communications were cut off, and no more information was sent back.

Definitely a terrible time to have an engine failure :/

[ronilan]

Based on the telemetry from the broadcast it seems that there was a failure at 13km that resulted in both telemetry and engine loss. When telemetry connection came back vertical speed has already doubled and it kept going up until spacecraft hit the ground. Engine was probably never restarted.

Edit1: Telemetry came back at 10k. For the next minute and a half there was uncertainty about the main engine even though telemetry clearly showed vertical speed going up fast. More then a minute later, at 5k a reset request was made.

Edit2: A minute goes by and at about 500m controller asked if there is a confirmation to send rest to JPL, another, announced that engine is on. Crash happens at that moment. 149m, 134.3ms vertical.

[whoopdedo]

When they said the engine had a problem the altitude was 678m and vertical velocity was 130.1m/s. After restart it was 149m at 134.3m/s. They never had a chance. Assuming those numbers were correct. A few minutes before they had lost the intertial measurement unit.

[reaperducer]

then communications were cut off, and no more information was sent back.

Have any of these moon landings been done at night where people have been able to watch it happening through a telescope? Or are things so small at the moon's distance that there'd be nothing to see?

[Hamuko]

When is it not a terrible time to have an engine failure?

[duxup]

Gotta be a terrible "oh man we're back up---- nope" moment :(

[Taniwha]

There was mention there about IMU issues - losing track of where you're pointing, then trying to recover could mean you're pointing the wrong way (while still running the main engine ....)

[m0zg]

Surprised by the sheer number of naysayers on the thread. What is wrong with you people?

7th country to get that far in space, 4th to attempt to land, those are enormous achievements for a country that's has 2/3rds the population of New York (city, not state) and doesn't have a hundred billion dollars to burn in a dick-measuring contest. They'll launch another one and land next time.

If Israel knows anything, it's how to persevere.

[51Cards]

Article subtitle: "The failure of the landing highlighted the risks of a fast and cheap approach to space exploration."

I would say the opposite. Not specifically just in reference to this mission but in general. They now have a lot of experience and data to use going forward for "not much" expense. A lot of extremely expensive missions were lost because they didn't have the opportunity to iterate.

[mjevans]

The history of rocketry really took off during WW-II, and was further refined by the military (generic, but pretty much the nations that have successfully landed on the moon), further developing and releasing to civilian government, and eventually private interests.

If I were to make a guess extrapolation to air-flight we're probably still roughly in the 1940s. Private space flight is making things more standard and long-run production instead of one-offs; but we aren't there yet and haven't found workhorse designs that are both reliable and cheap. Experiments like this will hopefully help us get there.

[pnathan]

the US had a tremendous number of rockets lost early on in the space program. Each was a learning opportunity.

hats off to SpaceIL! I look forward to following their next go at it.

[chasd00]

yeah that's kind of a ridiculous statement. Big and expensive approaches to space exploration fail just the same.

[mmsimanga]

If at first, you fail, try and try again. This was sobering. I watched expecting the normal rush I get when watching live events of this nature but it was not to be.

[talhof8]

Still a great achievement! An inspiration for all kids looking to do science.

[sctb]

Discussion prior to the outcome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19634570.

[ragebol]

That's got to be tough: successfully going ~300000km from Earth and then see it fail in the last couple hundred meters. With nothing you can do.

[moate]

Landings and take offs are always the hardest part of any aerospace event. You're much more likely to see system or mechanical failures when you first start everything up or try to stop moving on an uneven surface.

[deathhand]

Why do we give aid to space fairing nations? Couldn't the aid be better spent on our own space program?

[gerash]

It seems Israel is doing just fine economically and technologically. So I don't get why US politicians still justify giving out O($billion) every year in foreign aid while there are ample opportunities to spend them in their own country.

[scarejunba]

Because if you just gave billions of dollars to Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon people would complain. So you give it to someone and make them buy from these guys.

[bsaul]

you give aid to political allies that share a common view of what democracy is about, and face high military threats.

Budget for this lunar mission is probably extremely small compared to military spendings.

[rmason]

I am not sure what connection that Buzz Aldrin had to the folks at SpaceIL but thought he had a pretty classy tweet tonight. Guess everyone in the space community pulls for each other.

https://twitter.com/TheRealBuzz/status/1116458014708420608

[acomjean]

Well they got very close. I really can't get enough of images from space. The gallery linked from the article was pretty good.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/11/science/space...

I haven't been able to find what it would have done had it landed correctly. (edit) I guess it had a few scientific instruments and a "time-capsule" of sorts. Wikipedia editors are fast, they already have the crash on there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceIL --------------- Payload

The spacecraft carried a "time capsule" created by the Arch Mission Foundation, containing over 30 million pages of analog and digital data, including a full copy of the English-language Wikipedia, the Wearable Rosetta disc, the PanLex database, a Nano Bible (complete Bible in Hebrew), children's drawings, a children's book inspired by the space launch, memoirs of a Holocaust survivor, Israel's national anthem (Hatikvah), the Israeli flag, and a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.[8][35][36][37][38]

Its scientific payload included a magnetometer supplied by the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science to measure the local magnetic field, and a laser retroreflector array supplied by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to enable precise measurements of the Earth–Moon distance.[39][40] ---------------------

As an aside, the youtube video series on the original Apollo launch computer it pretty neat. (The core memory on those old machines was nuts..)

https://www.youtube.com/user/mverdiell/videos

[Ice_cream_suit]

Great name ! In Hebrew, it means " In the beginning..."

[sharksauce]

The saddest thing is that the moon men are still bereft of queso: https://www.kvue.com/article/news/weird/austin-queso-launche...

[sandworm101]

A hard landing is still a landing. This is rocket science, not general aviation.

[dmitryminkovsky]

I don't understand how you even attempt to recover from failures that occur during a descent like this. Latency to the moon appears to be 1.3 seconds. How much time do you have to do anything?

[deathhand]

Multiple 'if' statements and then backup modules loaded with more 'ifs'

[sschueller]

Why did they not have live video of the landing attempt? Should be double shouldn't it? What was used in the 60s to broadcast the landing?

[sanxiyn]

This was an extremely low budget mission. Live video is of course doable, but probably not with the budget.

[peteradio]

So is this the first moon wreckage?

[olex]

Far from it. Both the USA and USSR have crashed multiple landers before successfully touching one down. And that doesn't even count intentional "impactor" missions that came before that.

[nicodjimenez]

After seeing how people drive in Tel Aviv, I'm not surprised.

[rsstack]

This project wasn't started by the state or by any university. This was a, mostly, volunteer project that wanted to excite children about STEM and space and to educate the young generation. The Prime Minister was invited because it was cool, but it was a private endeavour.

[_zachs]

Think you missed the point there Matto.

[peteradio]

Space is not a race, its a jungle gym. Get on it.

[ncmncm]

I just wonder if the encyclopedia survived. It seems possible.

[Jach]

Too bad. "You just destroyed a 100 megabuck lander." Alternatively, 85% of a Juicero.

[nayyad]

So now you want to convince me that in 1969 they could man land on the moon and then come back to earth and in 2019 they still trying to nail down the tech ?

[rorykoehler]

How much did NASA spend in the 60s?

[techie128]

Do I detect a bit of condescension in NYT's tone? Do we need to remind the numerous failures US & USSR had before they got their space program off the ground? Also, they forgot India who did send a lunar orbiter and sent a probe on Moon's surface back in 2008.

[KSS42]

I didn't notice any condescension in the article. I thought it was fairly positive towards the mission. Also, India was mentioned in the article.

[sanxiyn]

Chandrayaan-1's Moon Impact Probe was an impactor, not a lander.