The first privately funded mission to the Moon will attempt to land on the lunar surface today.
The Israeli spacecraft – called Beresheet – will try for a soft touch down, before taking pictures and conducting experiments.
Until now, only government space agencies from the former Soviet Union, the US and China have achieved this.
The mission has cost about $100m, paving the way for future low-cost lunar exploration.
Beresheet, which is Hebrew for “in the beginning”, is a joint project between SpaceIL, a privately funded Israeli non-profit organisation, and Israel Aerospace Industries.
Morris Kahn, the founder of SpaceIL, told BBC News: “The landing will be extremely challenging.
“But we’ve got good engineers, the spacecraft has responded well to our instructions over the last two months…
I’m reasonably confident but a little nervous.”
In space terms, the Moon is a mere hop from the Earth, and most missions take a few days to get there.
But the Beresheet mission, which launched on 22 February from Cape Canaveral in Florida, has spent weeks reaching its destination.
Its journey has taken it on a series of ever-widening orbits around the Earth, before being captured by the Moon’s gravity and moving into lunar orbit on 4th April.
The average distance to the Moon is 380,000km (240,000 miles) – Beresheet has travelled more than 15 times that distance.
And the main thing driving this has been cost.
Instead of sitting alone on a rocket that would put it on the perfect trajectory to the Moon, it blasted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket along with a communications satellite and an experimental aircraft.
Sharing the ride into space significantly reduced its launch costs – but it has meant the spacecraft has had to take a much more convoluted route.
