As the global space economy expands and private launch companies race to lower costs and widen access, one Israeli venture is betting that the country’s next frontier may lie in bringing military-grade expertise into civilian space.
That is how Hilla Haddad Chmelnik, a former senior figure in Israel’s defense and public sectors, describes the logic behind Moonshot, a company she helped establish, trying to rethink how payloads are launched into space. Speaking with ynet Global in an interview, she argued that Israel already has two world-class engines — its defense industries and its innovation ecosystem — but has yet to fully connect them in the civilian space arena.
Interview with Hilla Haddad Chmelnik
“I see that we have really two strong engines — the defense industries of Israel, which obviously are the best in the world, and the innovation ecosystem and the high-tech ecosystem, which is also one of the best in the world, but they are not working together,” Haddad Chmelnik said. “Space is the natural place for them to meet.”
Haddad Chmelnik said her own training helped shape that outlook. As an aerospace engineer, she said, the discipline teaches both optimism and rigor. “Being an aerospace engineer makes me very optimistic,” she said. “You have to be optimistic in order to believe that you will calculate everything right and it will work even though you have just one chance.”
That mindset, she said, was reinforced after graduating and joining the Israeli Air Force missile test unit, where missions such as missile tests or satellite launches allow no room for casual error. “You have one time Arrow test or satellite launcher, and you have to believe that you will do everything right,” she said. “You work hard for that, but you have to believe that technology will work.”
Moonshot’s goal, she said, is to address a growing bottleneck in the expanding space economy: how to move more payloads into orbit without relying only on traditional rockets. “For now we have one way to go to space, and it’s with chemical rockets,” she said. “You cannot beat the tyranny of the rocket equation.”
She described the current system as inherently inefficient, saying huge quantities of fuel are burned to send up relatively small payloads. Moonshot, she said, is trying a different approach through kinetic launch, transferring energy from the ground instead of carrying all of it onboard. “We are trying to do a kinetic launch, so instead of taking the fuel with us, taking the energy, we are bringing to the payload the energy from the ground,” she said. “You can think about it as FedEx to space.”
For Haddad Chmelnik, the company’s edge lies in expertise developed in Israel’s missile-defense world, where success has depended on high performance under severe constraints. “The base of Moonshot is the know-how of the defense industry of Israel,” she said. “We have no other option but to succeed, and we have to do that without a lot of money and without a lot of space of doing tests.”
That, she said, forced Israeli defense programs to become deeply reliant on simulations — and simulation capability is now central to Moonshot’s work. “It has to be very highly dependent on simulations, so we have to develop very, very good simulators, and this is the core of what we do at Moonshot,” she said.
She also pointed to the experience concentrated inside the company, saying members of the team came out of major Israeli missile-defense programs, including Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow.
Asked what might distinguish the company from larger global players such as SpaceX or Blue Origin, Haddad Chmelnik answered with what she called an “unfair advantage”: talent.
“I think the unfair advantage is the know-how that we have here and the blue ocean of talent,” she said. “We have a huge blue ocean of the best talent in the world, and I’m not fighting for it with SpaceX or with Blue Origin.”
In Israel, she said, that means being able to "cherry-pick" top engineering talent in a way that would be far harder in the United States.
Still, she argued, Israel has already missed one opportunity to become a major civilian space player, despite having been the eighth country to launch its own satellites.
“We have all the ability to do that, and we are not players with SpaceX, with Blue Origin, with Rocket Lab,” she said. “We cannot afford ourselves to again stay out of the game.”
In her telling, the reason is not lack of capacity, but years of concentrating primarily on defense needs. “We were focused on defense, and it’s OK for that time,” she said. “But now when the space industry is going to boom again, we have to be there.”
She said the defense sector itself is too busy with national security demands to build that civilian bridge alone. “The defense industry, their hands [are] full with work. They have to take care of our national defense,” she said. “Someone else — Moonshot — has to take this knowledge and bring it out … to the civil space economy and not defense economy.”
Haddad Chmelnik then turned from launch systems to career advice, especially for young women considering physics or aerospace. “In Israel, go do the physics bagrut. You have to have it,” she said, calling it “the key” to many future paths.
Her broader advice was blunter. “Just don’t give a sh*t. You can do whatever you want,” she said. “Even if you are alone in the room, make it an advantage and not a disadvantage.”
Rather than seeing visibility as a burden, she said she learned to use it. “I remember when I get into a room, people remember me,” she said. “Because there’s a lot of men and one woman.”
Then she offered the line that may best capture both the interview and the company name behind it. “Christina Koch got to the moon,” Haddad Chmelnik said. “So if she got to the moon, we can go everywhere.”
First published: 10:43, 04.21.26