Yonatan Weintraub. Photo: YouTube Screenshot.

Yonatan Winetraub

Co-founder of SpaceIL

The State of Israel, known for scientific and technological innovations that better lives worldwide, benefited from a little nudge when it came to the space industry.

That’s where the Ilan Ramon Scholarship Project, a nonprofit organization, stepped in. The group was created in memory of Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut for NASA who was killed in the fatal 2003 Columbia mission.

The project provided a scholarship to Yonatan Winetraub, among others, to study as a fellow with International Space University. As a result of that experience, Winetraub now heads SpaceIL, the Israeli group that hopes to reach the moon with an unmanned lunar lander in the Google LunarX contest. 

Winetraub already has plans if his group win the $20 million contest: “We’re intending to donate the entire prize money … to promoting science and technology among youth. And we’re the only team in the competition that does that.”

He is also currently a PhD candidate at Stanford University in Biophysics studying a method to interpret and intercept cancer cell communication.