The world’s first privately-funded and operated lunar lander, an entrant in the defunct Google Lunar X-Prize competition, suffered a failure during a landing on the lunar surface. The Beresheet lander (“in the beginning” in Hebrew, so named after an Israel-wide naming competition) was designed and built by SpaceIL from 2011 onwards for the Lunar X-Prize competition, and the project continued when the Lunar X-Prize was ended in 2018 without a winner, or even without an entry flying into space.
