The world’s first privately funded moon lander was launched Thursday night from Cape Canaveral.

The small lander, named Beresheet (Hebrew for “In the Beginning”) was built by an Israeli non-profit company, SpaceIL, that raised $100 million to build and launch it. The mission is not entirely private since it has government partners, including Israel.

It was carried into space as part of the payload aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral FL. It will coast relatively slowly to the moon, hopefully making a safe, soft landing in April.

The landing site is in the Sea of Serenity, a vast dark plain on Luna’s northern hemisphere next to the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed 50 years ago this July.

“There, it will study the presence of magnetism in lunar rocks, a phenomenon that is puzzling given [the moon’s] lack of a global magnetic field,” writes Elizabeth Gibney in Nature magazine.

Gibney describes Beresheet as “little more than a demonstrator,” expected to last just two days on the Lunar surface, yet it is “symbolically important.”

“It would be Israel’s first Moon mission, as well as the first privately backed craft to ‘soft land’ on the Moon’s surface — until now, the preserve of an elite club of the national space agencies of the United States, China and Russia,” Gibney writes.

She adds that if it is successful, Beresheet “could herald a crop of new landers and flip the business model for lunar exploration to one in which private first essentially sell a delivery service” to the moon.

(watch the video of the launch above from SpaceX-scroll through the time bar to watch the launch)