
An Israeli spacecraft is gearing up for a 2019 Moon mission - sohkamyung
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/spaceil-lander-feature.html
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dotancohen
Just to clear something up, a small detail is slightly misrepresented in the
fine article. NASA asked SpaceIL to include a laser retroreflector for use for
future lunar navigation. Every gram counts on a craft like this, and SpaceIL
is providing NASA a service by bringing the LRA down with it. The article
frames the relationship as NASA doing SpaceIL a favor by giving them the LRA,
which is a paperweight today and will continue to be so until suborbital lunar
navigation becomes commonplace. I.e., not in the mission timeframe.

Note that NASA is in fact being very generous towards SpaceIL, by providing
time on the DSN and other assets. I'm just clearing up the bit about the LRA.

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OpenBSD-reich
Over thirty billion dollars per year in aid with no strings attached. They owe
us, it's the least they can do!

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wolf550e
3 per year, not 30.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–United_States_relations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel–United_States_relations)

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yostrovs
Israel defends itself, though, unlike Japan, S. Korea, or Germany. The tens of
thousands of troops in those countries are not counted as foreign aid. But
having them there, their guns and equipment, food,etc, is a lot more than
direct aid to Israel.

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boltzmannbrain
Love to see the XPrize teams pushing on; also Astrobotic [1] and Moon Express
[2].

[1] [https://www.astrobotic.com/](https://www.astrobotic.com/)

[2] [http://www.moonexpress.com/](http://www.moonexpress.com/)

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jacob019
Amazing that a private entity in a tiny country can scrape up the resources to
go to the freaking moon on mission of inspiration. Can't wait to see them land
it.

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kamaal
If you invest well in education, create quality human resources, and then give
them resources they can do anything.

In fact its mostly small countries who do big things. Greece under Alexander
the great.

And more recently England. It was like a small Island and pretty much ruled
the whole world.

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golergka
Or better yet, live in persecution that makes it harder to succeed with manual
agricultural labour but easier through crafts and trade, build your culture
and religion about literacy and education, and remain a tight ethno-religious
group with social pressure (both from within and outside) to inter-marry.

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billfruit
No info in the article as per my eye on the probable date of launch.

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andyjohnson0
"Early in 2019" according to [1].

[1][https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-9-rideshare-
commerci...](https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-falcon-9-rideshare-commercial-
lunar-lander-2019/)

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bob_paulson
wtf people are looking on the moon, beside some pride?

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golergka
Strange mission purpose: all you have to do to get motivated for a STEM career
is to open yad2 and check out Tel Aviv rent rates.

