Israel to be 3rd country to put its flag on the moon?

Team SpaceIL is entering Google space race with a nanorocket bearing Israeli flag.

A team of scientists and space enthusiasts is aiming to make Israel the third country to reach the moon, with a little help from an entrepreneur donor.

Team SpaceIL has developed a nanorocket, and is entering the Google Lunar X Prize - a global lunar competition whose prize is a whopping $30 million.

SpaceIL’s ship is designed to be the smallest craft possible, and built using the latest nanotechnology. The team has planning the smallest spacecraft in the world and the first ever nano-spaceship to land on the moon.

The competition requires entrants to successfully land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. The spacecraft must then travel across the surface of the moon, and send data back to Earth. Space IL's craft bears an Israeli flag

http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=303014

Israel cheats all the way to the Moon On February 11, 2013, SpaceIL finally exposed its plan to land an Israeli vehicle on the moon. This came after the Israeli enterprise announced on January 2011 that it will compete for Google's Lunar X Prize, an X Prize Foundation space competition sponsored by Google. Announced on September 2007, it called for privately-funded spaceflight teams to compete in launching, landing, and traveling more than 500 meters across the surface of the Moon with a robot, while sending back images to Earth. It offers a total of US$30 million in prizes. Additional prizes are given for traveling ten times the baseline requirements (more than 5,000 meters), capturing images of the Apollo program remains or other man-made objects on the Moon, verifying the recent detection of water ice on the Moon, or surviving a lunar night. It clearly shows what the concerns of the organizers are. More