A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried Israel’s first non-profit lunar lander outside the atmosphere where it will set it free towards the moon. If the lander successfully touches down on the moon, Israel will finally join the United States, China, and the former Soviet Union in nations that have sent a lander to the moon.  

Israel’s robotic spacecraft, “Beresheet” was created by Space IL, a non-profit organization. It is the first private moon lander and was a previous finalist for the Google Lunar XPrize, which had no winner.  

The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Thursday night at 8:45 PM (ET) carrying the Beresheet lander, which is Hebrew for Genesis. The launch also marks the third for the Falcon 9 first stage booster.  

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine congratulated the launch of the Israeli moon mission, saying: “Congratulations to SpaceIL and the Israel Space Agency. This is a historic step for all nations and commercial space as we look to extend our collaborations beyond low-Earth orbit and on to the moon.”  

The $100 million Beresheet mission couldn’t afford its own rocket, so the organizers shared a ride.  

“We thought it was about time for a change,” said Yonatan Winetraub, co-founder of Space IL. “and we want to get little Israel all the way to the moon.”  

Beresheet will measure the local magnetic field of the moon and send data back with pictures in order to better understand how it formed. The spacecraft also carries a digital time capsule containing a library filled with 30 million pages on a disk from the U.S.-based Arch Mission Foundation. The capsule also carries a picture of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died aboard space shuttle Colombia in 2003.  

The washing machine-sized Beresheet can only last a few days, according to The New York Times. Once it lands, it will spend its remaining days collecting information from our natural satellite.