Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Here’s How To Watch Israel’s Historic Moon Landing

Close to two months after the initial launch, an Israeli spacecraft has gone into the moon’s orbit and will attempt to land on its surface.

If it all works well, Israel will have made history in achieving the first moon landing from a private company, Business Insider reported. This would also make Israel the fourth country to have a spacecraft survive an attempt to have an object land on the moon.

Called Beresheet (Hebrew for “Genesis”), the module was launched on a SpaceX rocket on February 21. Since then, the rover has accelerated at a gradual pace towards the moon – and even passed the time by taking a selfie. SpaceIL, a nonprofit group based at Tel Aviv University, had been developing the spacecraft since 2011 on about a $100 million budget from mostly private donors.

SpaceIL anticipates that Beresheet will land on the moon at some point between 3 and 4PM EDT on Thursday, April 11, Business Insider reported.

“This joint mission of SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) will be broadcast live via satellite for a pool feed and livestreamed with access to all media,” SpaceIL wrote in a statement. The broadcast will also take viewers inside the mission control center in Yehud, Israel.

Watch below for a livestream of this historic event:

Adrianna Chaviva Freedman is the Social Media Intern for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @ac_freedman

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.