An Israeli group is “nearly there” in completing the construction of its first spaceship to place the flag of the Jewish State on the moon.
The project, SpaceIL, has successfully concluded a preliminary design review at the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) where plans for a spacecraft with four fuel tanks carrying 90 kg of fuel were scrutinized.
Bezeq is joining the venture by offering its support and helping to transfer a live HD broadcast from the spacecraft to Earth using infrastructures that are to be built especially for the project.
Most important, the team has acquired the manual -- “the PDR” on how to build a spacecraft that will fly to the moon, “from the ground up,” project chairman Yanki Margalit told Arutz Sheva.
The spacecraft is to include several original Israeli technologies, according Margalit, including new navigation systems, The Earth Moon Sensor and OpNav.
“We have made a lot of progress,” Margalit said, “and we have never been in such a great position... we are [now] actually expecting to start building the spaceship, once we know how to do it.
The spacecraft itself is designed to land on the moon by free fall, he said, using special “eyes” developed by a Weizmann Institute expert on brain control processes.
The landing itself is planned for sunrise and the spacecraft is expected to remain on the surface of the moon for two days before “jumping” to a height of 220 meters and traveling horizontally to a distance some 500 meters away.