(CNN) Aiming to become the fourth country to make a soft landing on the moon, Israel's non-profit SpaceIL has announced it will launch a spacecraft from Florida's Cape Canaveral Thursday on board a Falcon 9 rocket.

The unmanned craft, weighing 1,300 pounds and standing approximately five feet tall, will then begin an about seven-week journey to the moon, from where it will send back images of the rocky surface and conduct experiments on the lunar magnetic field.

The spacecraft is called "Beresheet," a reference to the first words of the Bible in Hebrew: "In the beginning..."

Perhaps it should have been called "Chutzpah."

For decades, the moon was the exclusive domain of the superpowers. The Soviet Union landed Luna 2 on the Earth's nearest neighbor in 1959. Three years later, the United States landed Ranger 4 on the moon.

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