Last Thursday night, the lunar module designed by the private Israeli company SpaceIL and given the name Beresheet (Genesis) was expected to land on the moon. The unit had been successfully launched into lunar orbit, but the delicate piece of technology with which it measured the distance between itself and the moon’s surface malfunctioned, leading to a crash landing. Armin Rosen, who was present at the SpaceIL headquarters, reports:

The span between the first loss of telemetry and word that the landing failed was maybe three minutes tops, and probably much less. A cosmic drama quickly and unexpectedly became a human one. How do you make sense of getting so close and losing the mission? One could soon attain some purely descriptive understanding of what occurred: as Ofer Doron, [one of the mission’s overseers], told the media afterwards, a malfunction in the inertial measurement system led to a cascade of events that resulted in an accidental full-engine cutoff.

Beresheet was built with almost no redundancies, so there wasn’t a second computer to take over at the first sign of real trouble. The mission depended on a thin margin for error during the final 450 feet of its interplanetary journey (although it later turned out that the problems started fourteen kilometers from the surface). . . .

[O]ne of the funders of the mission likened the endeavor to the Passover song Dayeinu, [“it would have been enough for us”]: if the probe had merely succeeded in reaching its correct altitude after launch, dayeinu. If all of the maneuvers had merely gone successfully, dayeinu. If Beresheet had merely entered lunar orbit, dayeinu. There were countless dayeinus. One of the most audacious private space ventures ever attempted had been, at worst, a 95-percent success. “We got Israel to places we didn’t imagine before,” Kfir Damari, [one of the founders of SpaceIL], said. “The Israeli flag is still on the surface, on an Israeli-made spacecraft,” said [his cofounder] Yonatan Weintraub.

On Saturday, it was announced that work had commenced on Beresheet 2.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.