Moon Landing by Israel's Beresheet Spacecraft Appears to End in Crash
Source: New York Times
A small spacecraft that has captured the imagination and excitement of people in Israel and around the world appears to have crashed on the moon.
“We have a failure of the spacecraft,” said Opher Doron, the general manager of Israel Aerospace Industries’ space division, which collaborated on building the spacecraft. The mood at the control center was somber but still celebratory.
“Well we didn't make it, but we definitely tried,” said Morris Kahn, an Israeli telecommunications entrepreneur and president of SpaceIL, the nonprofit that undertook the mission. “I think we can be proud.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who attended the event at the mission’s command center in Yehud, Israel, said, “If at first you don’t succeed, you try again.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/science/israel-moon-landing-beresheet.html
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Subscript (available below the comic by pressing the red button; later years he included mouseover comments as well)
Too preachy.
Your complaint won't save the whales.
People *really* need to stop with the "Why are we spending money on X when we should be doing Y?" nonsense when it comes to science because it is terribly naive. Science funding isn't a zero sum game. Not all scientists are qualified to work in all fields. Developments and insights from one field can have cross-field application. Then there's the not-small matter of we may need to figure out how to live off-world if it appears the Earth is going to become Human-inhospitable if our species it to survive. We can actually research more than one thing at a time. Be grateful that there are people who dedicate their lives to a particular field of study. Their work might not impact you directly, then again it might. Science is deep, complex, and vast and there are millions of people working to explore it in all its facets. To pick going to Luna as an example, it could become a source of plentiful off-world fuel mined from the regolith, and it gives a nearby test bed for methods of long-term off-world missions to Mars, the Belt and beyond in addition to the research missions already being conducted by deep space probes or Earthbound telescopy.
We won't all die, but it will impact menstrual cycles. 
I remember watching some crazy youtube videos leading up to the LCROSS mission.
