From crash landings to out-of-this-world cotton, 2019 was a big year for lunar exploration. Previously, only the U.S., Russia and China had managed to land successfully on the moon. But now other national space agencies are charging ahead with their own science goals, and private companies of all sizes are finding ways to join in. Not to be left out, NASA is renewing its own plans for lunar exploration. The result has been a year of lunar successes and failures — and lots of big talk — with final outcomes still very much up in the air.
Israel Shoots for the Moon
The lunar lander Beresheet made history this year, though not exactly how its creators intended. Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL, teaming up with state-owned defense company Israel Aerospace Industries, built and operated the craft. SpaceIL was founded for one main purpose: getting to the moon. It was a response to Google’s Lunar XPRIZE, which in 2007 promised $20 million to a company that could land gently on the moon and complete a small series of tasks. No team had claimed the prize by the time it expired, after repeated extensions, in 2018.
The Beresheet mission continued anyway, launching Feb. 22 on a Falcon 9 rocket made by U.S. company SpaceX. It entered lunar orbit on April 4, making it the first privately funded spacecraft — and Israel the seventh nation — to orbit the moon.
But on April 11, as Beresheet approached the surface, a faulty response to a minor sensor failure triggered an engine shutdown. Mission control managed to restart the engine, but by that point it was moving too fast to avoid a crash. When mission control lost contact with the spacecraft, it was less than 500 feet from the surface, and moving at more than 300 mph. (Wired reported in August that the crash landing may also have introduced tardigrades — hardy life-forms that can survive incredibly harsh conditions — onto the lunar surface. Their fate remains unknown.)
