Israel's Beresheet spacecraft crashes during historic moon landing attempt

An Israeli spacecraft attempting to make history by becoming the first privately funded craft to land on the moon suffered an engine malfunction during its descent and crashed onto the lunar surface.

The Beresheet spacecraft was to have touched down on the moon between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. ET. But officials with SpaceIL, the Israeli nonprofit organization behind the mission, reported that they lost contact with the four-legged spacecraft as it neared the surface of the moon.

"We didn't make it," SpaceIL chairman Morris Kahn said during a livestream of the landing attempt. "The achievement to getting to where we got is really tremendous."

If successful, Israel would have become the fourth nation — after the United States, Russia and China — to land a spacecraft on the moon.

Beresheet — the name means “genesis” in Hebrew — performed a final pre-landing maneuver Wednesday, firing its engines for 32 seconds to bring it within 10 miles of the lunar surface.

During the landing attempt, the four-legged craft, about the size of a washing machine, beamed back a "selfie" from an altitude of about 14 miles above the lunar surface. Against a backdrop of the moon's pockmarked surface, the photo showed one of the space probe's legs and a view of a plaque emblazoned with Israel's flag and the words "Small country, big dreams."

The $100 million spacecraft had been expected to touch down on a vast lava plain known as Mare Serenitatis, or the Sea of Serenity, on the lunar nearside. This site is a few hundred miles east of the Apollo 15 landing site and about the same distance northwest of the Apollo 17 site, according to the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.