(Photos: Yaakov Lederman, Flash 90, AFP/Imagebank)

Just three years ago, Ariel Gomez was sitting for an interview at a company called Space IL, a small outfit in Tel Aviv.

Gomez had earned a degree in electrical engineering, been part of the team that built the Merkava tank in the army, and had worked at Elbit Systems, a major Israeli defense manufacturer.

Gomez, who was born in France and had immigrated to Israel at the age of 18, was, at this point in his life, feeling confident about his experience and skills. So he asked his interviewer directly what the company hoped to accomplish. Not wasting a second, the Space IL representative answered: “We are building a spacecraft that will go to the moon.”

Gomez remembers that his eyes opened wide and a broad smile crossed his face. “Nice. Sounds interesting. Now, seriously?” he said, not entirely believing that his interviewer wasn’t making a joke. After all, who goes to the moon these days?

“It was the most bizarre idea,” Gomez recalls, as we sit a few feet from the very spacecraft that he had helped build. “I didn’t believe that anyone could build a spacecraft that could reach the moon.”

And why would he? Before the Chinese landed a spacecraft on the dark side of the moon earlier this month, no one had done it since 1976, 42 years ago. And the last time a man walked on the moon was 1972, on the final mission of NASA’s Apollo program.

Gomez quickly gathered that Space IL was quite serious about its mission. The company had already been working on the project for five years and was in the homestretch. They needed someone like him to complete all the electronics for the lander. “So I’m sitting here, in this little office, being offered to take part in a project that will land the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon in just two years,” Gomez recalls. Was he interested, the interviewer wanted to know? Gomez didn’t have to think twice.

No Small Feat

Three years later, the spacecraft that he helped build — the size of a refrigerator and all of 600 kilograms, about the weight of a full-grown cow — is now being prepared for a mid-February launch in Cape Canaveral. If all goes as planned, it will be hurtled into space atop a Falcon X rocket built by the space transportation company Space X.

We didn’t actually see the spacecraft, called Beresheet, as it had already been wrapped up for delivery to the United States. But Gomez, a Torah observant Jew who lives in Ramat Beit Shemsh Gimmel, did tell us the amazing story of how tiny Israel is set to become just the fourth country in the world to make a moon landing.

(Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 746)