Perhaps last week’s news of an Israeli lunar lander crashing into the moon’s surface slipped under your radar.
Personally, I had myself not even heard about the mission — a first in that the flight was privately funded — until its unfortunate demise.
Initially launching on Feb. 21 piggybacked on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket along with a couple of other payloads, the small robotic craft, dubbed Beresheet — meaning "in the beginning" — has made history despite the failure on the final step of its space faring journey.
Although traditional trips to the moon — to date accomplished only by three world superpowers: the U.S., Russia and China — involve a far more costly direct voyage propelled by expensive rocket burns, the Israeli craft embarked on a much different and far more affordable approach.
The trade-off was a much longer trip that instead of days took about a month.
In a nutshell, mission control set the craft on a course that sent it along a trajectory of ever-increasing orbits around the Earth until it was eventually captured by the moon’s gravitational pull.
Only at the very end of this journey did disaster strike when landing boosters apparently failed for reasons still under investigation. Instead of softly touching down, the craft crashed.
While those in mission control obviously were not popping open celebratory bottles of champagne, they at the same time nevertheless expressed pride for a remarkable achievement. It will hopefully not only inspire young minds but also perhaps pave the way for a new method of reaching the lunar surface more affordably.
Our ability to fully tap into the potential of space exploration — where vast resources abound — is limited largely by astronomically exorbitant costs, pun intended.
And while the $100-million price tag of the Israeli attempt might sound like a lot, that amount pales in comparison with past programs like NASA's famous Apollo missions, which over the course of those flights racked up a tab in the tens of billions of dollars.
According to some quick research online, a single Saturn V rocket launch cost upward of $375 million in 1969. Or in other words, a few billion dollars in today’s currency once inflation has been accounted for.
So $100 million, which included the cost of not only launching but also building the lunar lander, seems like a bargain.
I’ll be curious to see how this advancement impacts the future of reaching further out within our own solar system.
