The company, founded in 2024 by Hila Hadad Hamelnik, Fred Simon, and Shahar Bahiri, is developing an electromagnetic accelerator that will reach speeds of up to 8 kilometers per second for launching payloads into space and a hypersonic test facility in Caesarea – and is expected to change the rules of the game in the space and defense industries.
The startup Moonshot was revealed after a year and a half of secrecy with a $12 million fundraising, led by Angular Ventures, of which $1 million is a grant from the Innovation Authority's startup fund. The company was founded in 2024 by Hila Hadad Hamelnik, formerly CEO of the Ministry of Innovation and Science and a member of the Iron Dome development team; Fred Simon, co-founder of the software unicorn JFrog; and Shahar Bahiri, co-founder of Valerann, a company specializing in AI-based smart transportation.
A team formed around the founders, including senior officials from the defense establishment and the government, leaders in the space field, and experienced high-tech entrepreneurs. Among them are Gil Eilam (Chief Systems Engineer), former Chief Systems Engineer of the David Sling Interception System, Ran Levena (Business Development Manager), former CEO of the Ramon Foundation and head of the mission of the second Israeli astronaut in space, and Alon Oshpiz, former Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Israeli Ambassador to India. Moonshot currently employs 32 employees, most of them at the development center in the Caesarea Industrial Park.
At the heart of the company's technological development is a powerful electromagnetic accelerator, built to accelerate objects to hypersonic speeds of up to 8 kilometers per second (28,800 km/h), in a short time and using only electricity. The technology, which is at the forefront of science, is being developed for two main purposes: building a launcher that will launch payloads to supply resources and equipment to space stations and satellites; and building hypersonic test facilities that significantly shorten the development time of hypersonic systems.
In space, Moonshot's launch method allows the payload to exit the atmosphere without chemical propulsion, unlike traditional rockets. This increases the payload ratio at launch from the current 4% to over 45%, enabling frequent, faster, and significantly cheaper launches than any existing solution.
However, Moonshot does not seek to compete with the giant launchers of Elon Musk's SpaceX or Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. Its goal is to complement them with a dedicated launcher to supply the needs of the expanding space industry: fuels, raw materials and equipment for space systems operating in orbit, manufacturing in zero gravity, private space stations, tourism, data centers, and high-speed satellite Internet. The company has signed initial agreements with leading companies in the field of logistics and space refueling, including the Italian D-Orbit and the American Orbit Fab.
The accelerator currently being built in Caesarea is a scaled-down model of the large launcher and will be used by the local hypersonics industry as a testing facility for aircraft and hypersonic systems. The accelerator is expected to accelerate objects to speeds of 6 times the speed of sound (7,200 km/h), and provide a significant advantage in the rapid development of the next generation of systems. Against the backdrop of the international hypersonic development race, in which the US is investing in the GOLDEN DOME program and Israel stands out thanks to systems such as Arrow-3 and Slingshot, engineers are forced to make do with partial simulations, cumbersome wind tunnels and expensive missiles to develop the systems. The Moonshot accelerator is expected to allow the pace of experiments to be accelerated from one experiment per week to several experiments per day at a low cost.
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Don't throw your money away.
What if any reference to the boom effect is all sonic and will be heard in the center's skies? Doesn't a scientific website like Al-Hadan have anything to say about it?
Great challenge, I checked briefly and the length of the track required to reach a speed of 8000 meters per second is several kilometers (when talking about 1000g). With such a force, how will the payload not break apart? The moment it leaves the launcher, forces will begin to work on the payload that will pull it towards the Earth. How will that be enough to get out of the atmosphere? It seems to me that they will need a solution that incorporates a small rocket engine to overcome the problems I described.