“We are proud to officially confirm receipt and verification of SpaceIL’s launch contract, positioning them as the first and only Google Lunar X Prize team to demonstrate this important achievement thus far”, said Weiss.
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To remain in the running, teams have to produce a verified launch contract by the end of 2016. There was a press conference held on Wednesday in Jerusalem to share the news in which it was announced that SpaceIL, a team of 16, would be participating in the Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP) competition to reach the contract landmark. This was announced by XPrize Vice Chairman and President Bob Weiss in a statement on CBS.
SpaceIL’s contract is with the American aerospace manufacturer SpaceX to launch an unmanned craft to orbit the moon in the second half of 2017.
Instead of designing a robot that detaches from a lander and travels along the moon’s surface, SpaceIL’s spacecraft would land on the moon and then launch back in the air to land 500 meters away.
If Privman’s squad pulls it off, that would make Israel only the fourth country to plant a rover on the moon: The only others that have done so are the United States, China, and the Russian Federation. Company CEO Eran Privman says the move follows major project financing and engineering design milestones achieved a year ago.
Once the capsule separates from the launcher, it will automatically release the spacecraft, which will use advanced navigation sensors to guide it to the lunar surface, with engineers in a mission control room standing by to remotely send commands and corrections as needed.
An Israeli team competing in a race to the moon sponsored by Google has signed a with California-based SpaceX for a rocket launch, putting it at the front of the pack and on target for blast-off in late 2017, officials said.
The Google Lunar XPrize is overseen by a board of trustees including SpaceX founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk; Google co-founder Larry Page; Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group and movie producer James Cameron.
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This rocket has never actually flown, so two years isn’t a whole lot of time to prepare for takeoff, but even if the launch isn’t successful, private companies are changing the game for space exploration in the making. The first physical components of the new model are already starting to arrive at the SpaceIL integration lab.
