“This is our bigger vision,” Mr. Damari said. SpaceIL would build the first Israeli spaceship to travel far from Earth, but for today’s students, “It's their job to build the next one,” he said.

As part of SpaceIL’s parsimonious approach, Beresheet, which means “Genesis” or “in the beginning” in Hebrew, tagged along aboard the SpaceX rocket with an Indonesian communications satellite as well as a small experimental satellite for the United States Air Force.

Beresheet will not take the quick, direct path to the moon. That would require a fuel-guzzling firing of a large engine to break out of Earth orbit and then another to slow down at the moon. Instead, with several engine firings, the spacecraft will slowly adjust its orbit, stretching to the outermost point until the moon’s gravity pulls it into lunar orbit.

That is a long and winding, four million mile-long journey to reach a destination that is a quarter million miles away.

In April, it is to land at a lava plain named Mare Serenitatis, or the Sea of Serenity. An instrument built by the Weizmann Institute of Science will measure the moon’s magnetic fields as it approaches, and that data could help give clear hints about the moon’s iron core.

Beresheet is also carrying a durable backup of humanity’s knowledge in the form of a disc provided by the Arch Mission Foundation, containing 30 million pages of information, as well as a time capsule with Israeli cultural symbols and a Bible.

Within a few days of its landing, Beresheet is expected to succumb to the heat of lunar noon. Then, its mission will end.