Secretive Israeli startup Moonshot Space raises $12M, unveils electric launcher for hypersonic and orbital missions
Led by an Iron Dome veteran, JFrog co-founder and ex–Foreign Ministry Director, Moonshot Space has assembled a mix of defense engineers, diplomats, and space-program veterans.
After operating in near-total secrecy for more than eighteen months, Israeli startup Moonshot Space is emerging with an ambition rarely seen outside government laboratories. The company is developing a high-power electromagnetic launcher designed to propel objects to hypersonic speeds using electricity rather than chemical propellants, a technology it believes could reshape both orbital logistics and the global race for hypersonic capabilities.
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Moonshot has raised $12 million to date, led by Angular Ventures, including a $1 million grant from the Israel Innovation Authority. Founded in 2024, the company brings together a senior group of industry, defense, and government veterans: Hilla Haddad Chmelnik, former Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Science and a member of the Iron Dome development team; Fred Simon, co-founder of the software unicorn JFrog; Shahar Bahiri, co-founder of Valerann, a smart-mobility AI company.
They are joined by an executive lineup that includes Gil Eilam, former chief system engineer for the David’s Sling missile-defense system; Ran Livne, former CEO of the Ramon Foundation and head of Israel’s second astronaut mission; and Alon Ushpiz, former Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ambassador to India. Moonshot’s 32-person team operates primarily from Caesarea, where construction of the company’s first accelerator is underway.
At the heart of Moonshot’s technology is an electromagnetic acceleration system capable of pushing payloads to speeds of up to 8 kilometers per second. The company frames the platform around two core applications:
- Cargo delivery to space, and
- High-throughput hypersonic testing.
In the space domain, Moonshot’s approach sidesteps the chemical-propulsion physics that dominate rocketry. By removing onboard propellant, the company says it raises the payload fraction from the roughly 4% typical in today’s rockets to more than 45%. That, in turn, could allow rapid, low-cost resupply of orbital infrastructure, from satellites to future private space stations and manufacturing facilities.
Rather than competing with launch giants such as SpaceX, Moonshot sees itself as the logistics backbone that heavy-lift rockets would rely on once assets are already in orbit. Its cargo launcher is aimed at delivering fuels, materials, and consumables directly to spacecraft. The company has already signed preliminary agreements with two in-orbit servicing players: Italy’s D Orbit and Orbit Fab in the United States.
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In parallel, Moonshot is developing a smaller-scale accelerator intended specifically for hypersonic testing at speeds up to Mach 6. The facility targets a bottleneck faced by defense programs worldwide: realistic hypersonic evaluation is slow, costly, and limited by scarce testing infrastructure.
Today, programs rely largely on simulations, wind tunnels, or missile launches, each expensive and constrained. Moonshot’s system aims to shift from one test per week to several per day, while reducing costs by an order of magnitude. As the United States expands its GOLDEN DOME initiative and Israel continues advancing systems such as Arrow 3 and David’s Sling, the company argues that faster, cheaper experiments could meaningfully accelerate development cycles.
