The following story is excerpted from the Beresheet website. The Beresheet (Hebrew for "Genesis") Lunar Lander is a joint venture between the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, funded almost entirely by private donations from well-known Jewish philanthropists. SpaceIL was founded in 2011 to compete in the Google Lunar XPrize, a program that planned to award $30 million to the first privately funded team who could build a spacecraft and land it successfully on the moon. Beyond landing, the spacecraft, or a rover, had to travel a distance of 500 meters or more and beam high-definition imagery of the landing environment to Earth. The Google Lunar XPrize contest deadline ended in 2018 without a winner. Undaunted, SpaceIL forged ahead with the development and construction of the spacecraft.
Spaceflight also managed the launch of the two secondary payloads: Beresheet, an Israeli non-profit SpaceIL's lunar lander, and S5, an experimental small satellite of the US Air Force Research Laboratoy (AFRL) with a mass of 180 kg.
"It is a small and smart spacecraft," said SpaceIL CEO, Ido Anteby. "1.5 meters by 2 meters in size, weighing 600 kilograms at the time of the launch. Most of the weight is fuel – upon landing, the spacecraft's weight will have reached 180 kilograms. The spacecraft will be in touch with several ground stations on Earth and throughout its entire journey, we will maintain radio contact with it."
The website explains that] The spacecraft's elliptical orbit will gradually grow, until it encounters the Moon's orbit, where it will activate its motors to slow down and enter orbit around the Moon.