Israel just became the fourth country to send a spacecraft toward a moon landing, a feat previously accomplished only by the United States, Russia and China. In addition to scientific equipment, the craft, named Beresheet, also contains a digital time capsule that includes drawings of the moon and space by Israeli children, a photo of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon (who tragically died in the Columbia space shuttle disaster), a copy of the Tefilat HaDerech prayer which is traditionally said before a journey, and the Wikipedia encyclopedia. Normally, a journey to the moon takes 3-4 days, but Beresheet’s journey will take weeks. Why?
SPACEIL model as was presented in the 66th IAC in Jerusalem is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
A. The launch of the spacecraft from Cape Canaveral took place on Thursday. Rabbi David Lau, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, ruled that the flight could not continue over Shabbat, and as a result, the Israeli engineers had to program a pause in the flight at the beginning of sundown on Friday. However, Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, ruled that because the rocket ship was beyond earth’s atmosphere, its flight was covered by the calendar on the moon. A lunar day lasts over 29 earth days, so therefore the craft cannot reengage its engines and complete its mission until the end of March.
B. The length of the journey is connected to the size and weight of the craft. Basically the larger the craft, the faster it will travel through space. Most of the spacecrafts previously sent to the moon were quite large. The Apollo lunar modules, for example, were approximately 23 feet in height and weighed in the range of 10,000 pounds, whereas the Beresheet craft is barely the size of a washing machine and weighs just over 1000 pounds. As a result, it travels slower and will not achieve touchdown on the lunar surface until around April 3.
C. The Beresheet was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, along with an Indonesian communications satellite and an experimental satellite built by the United States Air Force. Because of this, the Israeli craft must take an indirect route in order that the two other payloads can be placed in their proper orbits. Therefore, instead of a straight path to the moon, Beresheet will circle the earth for weeks in ever-widening paths, until the proper time for it to change directions and head to the moon with a scheduled April 11 landing.
D. The length of a trip to the moon is dependent upon the time when the craft is launched, in relation to the position of the moon. Normally, the optimal launch date is chosen so that the craft will reach the proper rendezvous point with the moon, a difficult confluence to achieve. However, because Israel only built the landing craft, not the launching rocket, they were prevented from launching on the ideal date, which would have been April 3. Therefore, the craft has been programmed to circle the moon for about 6 weeks until the moon and craft are in proper alignment, at which point the Beresheet will launch its rockets and descend to the moon’s surface around April 7.
E. In order for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to get approval from the Knesset for the funding of the Beresheet project, he had to convince all of the coalition partners to go along with this significant outlay of shekels. The head of the government’s Finance Committee is Moshe Gafni, of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party. To get Gafni to sign on to this funding, Netanyahu had to give in to his demand that the journey take 40 days and 40 nights, mimicking the Exodus from Egypt.