What do the Iron Dome and a kinetic space launcher have in common? More than you might think.
In the latest episode of the Defense & Tech podcast by The Jerusalem Post, host Anna Ahronheim sits down with Hilla Haddad Chmelnik, CEO of Moonshot Space, veteran of the Israeli Air Force, and former Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology, for a wide-ranging conversation that connects the dots between Israel’s most celebrated defense achievement and its most ambitious commercial frontier.
Chmelnik, who was part of the team that certified the Iron Dome for operational use, describes feeling the “magic” the moment she encountered the project, a conviction that the system would work and that she had to be part of making it happen. That instinct proved right when, just months after she led the acceptance testing process, Iron Dome achieved its first successful interception. As she puts it, the system didn’t succeed by adapting old ideas; it succeeded by starting from a blank page.
Now, she’s applying that same philosophy to Moonshot Space, the Israeli startup aiming to become the “FedEx to space” through kinetic launch technology, a century-old concept only now made viable by modern engineering. Instead of chemically propelled rockets that carry their own fuel, Moonshot’s system uses electricity to accelerate a payload through a ground-based tube and release it into orbit using kinetic energy alone.
The result, Chmelnik explains, would slash launch costs from today’s $4,000 per kilogram to a few hundred, making routine, small-payload deliveries to space stations and orbital infrastructure genuinely economical. It’s a race she believes Israel can win, even as the United States and China pursue the same breakthrough.
It’s a conversation that moves seamlessly from battlefield innovation to existential national strategy, and it’s essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand where Israeli technology is headed next.
