Israeli Group To Attempt Moon Landing

cold fjord writes: "NDTV reports, 'Israel plans to do what only the world's biggest countries have so far managed to do: land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon ... only Russia, the U.S. and China have soft landed on the moon, and India hard landed its tri-colour using the moon impact probe in 2008 ... The washing machine-sized spacecraft that weighs 121 kilograms is being readied by a not-for-profit venture called SpaceIL. ... The Israeli lunar probe had its genesis after the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize was announced as a competition which challenged non-state-owned space agencies to land on the moon, send back photos, and move 500 meters on the surface of the moon. About two dozen global teams are racing to win the prize- SpaceIL reckons it's in pole position. ... ex-NASA engineer Yonatan Winetraub and two of his friends conceived of the spacecraft in 2010 ... then used a Facebook page to promote the dream. Today, the dream has matured into a $36 million mission with 20 full time employees and 250 volunteers. ... Around 40,000 school students have been associated with this project.' Further details are available here."

Re:and where do they get this money?

[ackthpt]

Maybe from the US citizens not the the US gov't. Only 10% of funds can come from a government source to eligible for the Lunar X prize.

One thing about Israel, they've a long track record of finding dirt cheap ways to do things the US government/military or such like to shovel billions of dollars at.

Re:Flying to the moon might turn out to be easier.

[techno-vampire]

Especially when you consider that most of your neighbors (if not all) belong to a religion that forbids them from making peace with anybody who doesn't share their religion. At best, you can get a long-term truce, but never peace. Who knows? Maybe flying to the Moon will help persuade the more reasonable factions in the Middle East that a very, very long-term truce with Israel is a Good Idea.

Re:Here come the rednecks

[paskie]

Individual groups of people all trying to accomplish the same thing or things is absolutely essential to get stuff done. It motivates people to focus and work hard on the problem, because they know that others are working hard too and they will likely reach similar quality and are progressing fast. The competition between people means competition between solutions, which allows the soundest solutions to prevail (up to exceptions).

Competition can be friendly, especially if you are not too emotionally invested, and that's great especially for the people involved. Unfriendly competition is still great in the long run even though it introduces redundancies. The space race gave a big surge to the technological progress. Sport competitions give many athletes (or chess players or whoever) an incentive to improve. Computer Go programs evolved rapidly recently also thanks to competition. Recent Debian discussions about their next init system gave massive boost to openrc development.

Without competition, people are lazy and slack, since any effort is not worth it! Competition is awesome!