SpaceIL[2] is an Israeli organization, established in 2011, that competed in the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) contest to land a spacecraft on the Moon.

[10] Its total budget for the mission is estimated at US$95 million, provided by Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn and other philanthropists, as well as the Israel Space Agency (ISA).

The SpaceIL entry was unique among GLXP contenders, in that instead of building a tracked or wheeled rover, SpaceIL planned to meet the requirement to travel 500 meters (1,600 ft) on the lunar surface by having the lander "hop" using rocket engine propulsion from its landing site to another site more than 500 meters away.

[23] By January 2019, testing was complete and the spacecraft was delivered to Cape Canaveral, Florida for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

[26] The cofounders of the team were Yariv Bash, former electronics and computer engineer in the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, and Flytrex CEO; Kfir Damari, a Computer Networking lecturer and entrepreneur;[7] and Yonatan Winetraub, formerly a satellite systems engineer at Israel Aerospace Industries and a biophysics PhD candidate at Stanford University.

Its aims included promoting careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); and landing its magnetometer and laser retroreflector on the Moon.

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, the Torah, 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.

[36][37] The Beresheet spacecraft secretly kept a few thousand microscopic animals on board, raising concerns about potentially contaminating the moon when it crashed in 2019.

[11][39] In October 2015, SpaceIL signed a contract for a launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, via Spaceflight Industries.

[46] Beresheet was to operate for an estimated two Earth days on the lunar surface,[16] as it had no thermal control and was expected to quickly overheat.

Within minutes before the expected landing, mission control received a "selfie" photograph from the probe with the lunar surface visible in the background.

The engine was brought back online following a system reset; however, the craft had already lost too much altitude to slow its descent sufficiently.