In 2019, Israel’s SpaceIL successfully launched its robotic lunar lander, Beresheet, into space. Although the vehicle crashed on landing, the mission made the Jewish state the seventh country to make a lunar orbit and the fourth country to attempt a soft landing on the Moon.
Despite that impressive achievement, Israel is not exactly synonymous with space exploration or even deep-space technology, although it does have an active space-tech sector in areas such as surveillance satellite development.
Experts say now is the time to accelerate deep-space efforts because this area is expected to become significant in the upcoming decades.
Mining data on the Moon
One of these experts is Roy Naor, cofounder and CEO of Israel-based global innovation hub Creation-Space, which recently launched Space Venture, a unique accelerator program to create and promote space-tech startups.
“Currently, there is no lunar economy, no client on the Moon who requires anything, but in 10 years from now, there will be,” Naor tells ISRAEL21c.
Naor says that mining resources on other planets will most likely be the first viable economic activity to emerge.
“The first resource to mine will be data from data centers, not minerals, because it would be cheaper, more sustainable and good for humanity,” notes Naor.
“Data centers are huge consumers of energy. They produce lots of heat and pollution. A data center on the Moon does not take real estate. It doesn’t ruin the desert … and you don’t need to use up water from our own resources to cool it,” he explains.
He says that superpowers, primarily the United States and China, compete for dominance on the lunar surface and deep space, as do private commercial players like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Naor says this momentum creates business opportunities that have the potential to “change the nation’s GDP.”
“We are in the right time in history for Israel to join the global effort to expand humanity beyond the Earth’s orbit,” he says.
Creation-Space
This is where Creation-Space comes in. “We’re here to educate the Israeli market,” says Naor.
“Israelis need to get out of the mentality that Americans are the astronauts, and we just build satellites. We’re leaders in deep technologies, but not deep-space technologies.”
Creation-Space was founded in 2023 by Naor, who holds a PhD in planetary sciences; Gal Yoffe, a systems engineer; and Alon Shikar, a space architect. It now employs 10 workers.
The hub was founded in partnership with CreationsVC, the company’s main investors, as well as the Merage Foundation Israel, the Jewish National Fund–USA (JNF-USA), the DeserTech & Climate Innovation Center, Meitar Patents, Or-Hof Law, Dead-Sea & Arava Science Center and 8200AC.
Its motto is “accelerating deep-space technologies with strong Earth applications.” This means technologies that present “dual value” for application in the rising lunar economy and on our home planet.
“Creation-Space targets problems that may occur in deep-space missions and either comes up with solutions and builds a company around this solution, or forms a joint venture with an entrepreneur that has its own solution in mind,” explains Naor.
Early startups that will be accepted into the Space Venture accelerator program will each receive up to $250,000 in addition to tech support, access to research facilities and test sites, and workshops hosted by top experts in the field, including NASA.
Naor says that since launching the accelerator in January, Creation-Space has been “overloaded with submissions that exceeded our expectations.”
To meet the demand and expand operations, the company recently opened its latest seed funding round.
Mitzpeh Ramon Space City
Creation-Space is situated in the small local council of Mitzpeh Ramon, deep in Israel’s southern Negev Desert. Its offices are located in the Mitzpeh Ramon Innovation Hub, built with the help from JNF-USA.
Mitzpeh Ramon sits atop an 860-meter ridge overlooking a geological wonder: the world’s largest erosion crater, known as the Ramon Crater (Makhtesh Ramon in Hebrew).
“When we study Mars, we observe it via remote sensing instruments, but it’s not enough.
“The best we can do for now is to go to analog environments on Earth and extrapolate the characteristics to Mars,” Naor says, referring to environments with properties that are analogous to certain characteristics of Mars.
One such environment is inside the Ramon Crater. Others are in Antarctica and various desert regions.
“But in Europe, they don’t have a desert. If somebody at the European Space Agency develops a rover and wants to drive it in their own sandbox, they potentially can land at Ben-Gurion Airport and two hours later be in a hyper arid desert in the middle of nowhere. At the moment, they go to Morocco and it’s very inaccessible.”
Choosing Mitzpeh Ramon was also part of a larger effort to turn this tourist town into the “space city” of Israel in cooperation with the Mitzpeh Ramon municipality and the Ministry of Economy and Industry’s National Program for Economic Growth, among other partners.
Nevertheless, Naor emphasizes that Creation-Space is here to help humanity in the long run, not prepare it for a relocation to a terraformed Mars.
“Some people advocate that we should go to Mars to live there because it would be a better life. Me? I’m not so sure. Even if there’s a nuclear war on Earth, it will still be better to live on Earth than on Mars,” he tells ISRAEL21c.
“We founded Creation-Space because we see space as the best accelerator for innovation for humanity… here on Earth.”
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