The overall purpose of the mission, SpaceIL says, is to inspire more Israelis to pursue STEM careers. Three engineers formed the non-profit in 2011 to compete for the Google Lunar X-Prize, a $30 million contest encouraging privately funded groups to land on the Moon. The first team to land, travel 500 meters and transmit imagery would have earned $20 million. A second-place team would have earned $5 million, and another $5 million was up for grabs through stretch goals like visiting an old Apollo site and contributing to STEM diversity.

Google withdrew the cash prizes in April 2018 when no group was able to meet the contest deadline, which had already been extended from 2017. A few teams, including SpaceIL, pushed on, and despite a brush with bankruptcy at the end of 2017, SpaceIL announced they would be ready to fly at the end of 2018. The launch has since been delayed until the "beginning of 2019," SpaceIL representatives said in response to emailed questions.

The lander, which is in the process of being named through an online contest, will leave Earth aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. SpaceIL is one of at least three customers with spacecraft aboard the flight. The primary payload is an Indonesian telecommunications satellite called PSN-6, built by sat-building company SSL. Another undisclosed rider rumored to be a U.S. government satellite.

Rideshare missions are common, but this one is unique because one spacecraft is headed to the Moon while two others will trek to geosynchronous orbit, a region almost 36,000 kilometers above Earth. There, satellites have one-day orbits to match Earth’s rotation, enabling them to linger over the same ground spot.

All three spacecraft will detach from the Falcon 9 into a geosynchronous transfer orbit with a high point, or apogee, of 60,000 kilometers. The SpaceIL lander will orbit Earth three times, raising its orbit until being captured by the Moon's gravity. The process will take more than two months, and at the Moon, the lander will make two orbits before landing.

In another mission twist, Spaceflight, the company that arranged the rideshare aspect of the Falcon 9 launch, says the undisclosed satellite will remain attached to PSN-6 while both satellites head to geosynchronous orbit. Ryan Olcott, a Spaceflight mission manager, called this arrangement "groundbreaking."

"We’re really thrilled to develop this relationship with SSL,” Olcott said. “It is a great enabler for a broad category of rideshares that would be much harder or impossible to perform with a single ring below a primary spacecraft." The company is already offering geosynchronous ridealongs as a dedicated service for future launches.