The moments of crisis during the eight years of the Beresheet spaceship project were the focus of the conversation between businessman and philanthropist Morris Kahn; Motti Scherf, the project's communications manager; and Morris Kahn Foundation CEO Dafna Jackson in front of a standing-room only audience at the Tel Aviv Charles Bronfman Auditorium in the 2019 Globes MAD (Marketing, Media, Advertising and Digital) Conference. Kahn asked the audience for permission to continue speaking past his allotted time, which approved three extra minutes with a round of applause.
Kahn talked about his visit to Cape Canaveral in the US, where he went to watch the space capsule being put into the rocket that carried it into space. "We flew from there to New York, and when the airplane landed and I got up to leave, I lost my balance and couldn't stand on my feet," Kahn recalled. "The stewards helped me to the door of the plane, and down to the ground. They called a paramedic to examine me, and he asked, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'I'm sending a rocket to the moon.' He told me, 'You should be in a hospital.' That's when I realized that the idea was crazy."
Explaining the project's origins, Kahn said, "The subject of outer space is not strange to me. When the three young people who said that they were participating in the competition came to me, I felt that it was an interesting challenge, and I decided to help them. I realized that they had no money, so I gave them $100,000 with no questions asked, and told them, 'Get started,' and that's how it began. Jackson later said, "The amount grew to eight million, then 20 million, and then 100 million."
Scherf asked Jackson when she realized that the spaceship would eventually be launched, and she talked about their meeting with people from Elon Musk's SpaceX project. "We saw Elon Musk's people and the people from the satellite that Beresheet was connected to. Morris invited everyone to dinner, and we all sat there. They told us 'We're so amazed at what you did.' To hear something like that from people working at big companies and at NASA made me say, 'OK, if people who have done this believe, and they're asking us how we did this, then it's probably going to happen.'"
Scherf shared with the audience one of the main insights from the project: "The strategy isn't so holy, and had there been a work plan, we might not have gotten to the moon. We started out as geeks and an organization of businesspeople, and we wound up being an inspiration for the people. There was no organized plan, but there was a goal. So don't take your eyes off the goal, but a strategy can be changed. Just leave your spreadsheets behind."
The most interesting story about how the Beresheet team overcame the giant obstacles to the launch was the one in which luck played the main role. Kahan said, "We ordered a special jumbo airliner to fly the spaceship to the US, and at the last minute, we discovered that we had no license to transport it there, and there was no one willing to give us a license. We pulled out all the stops, because we knew that if we didn't get to Cape Canaveral in time, it wouldn't work at all, and if we missed the launch, the project would die. I called a friend in the US, and he called the previous secretary of transportation, who told us that we could get approval only if what we were doing contributed to US national security. We were in a terrible state. Then we called people who knew Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law, and put all of our weapons into action: the US ambassador to Israel and the Israel ambassador to the US. They all tried, but nothing helped."
On the following day, Kahn said, a group of donors visited who had been invited to tour Israel Aerospace Industries six months earlier in order to get an impression of the Beresheet project. "They were wealthy donors, and they saw what we were doing, so I got the impression that they would donate money to us," Kahn remembers. "In the current visit, they invited me to see what they were doing. They founded a museum, and I realized that they wanted me to give them money, not to give me money. It's as if two pickpockets each tried to empty each other's pocket. So I gave them a million dollars. I thought that if I gave it to them, they might give me something. They didn't, but they saw that I was in a bad mood, and asked what the problem was. After I told them that the government wouldn't let us transport the spaceship to the US, they said, 'Maybe we can help.' From there, we got to the current US secretary of transportation, and he contacted Trump. We got the approval in a few hours, and the spaceship was on the way to the US."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 24, 2019
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