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An artist's rendering shows what Interlune's helium-3 harvester might look like on the lunar surface.
The company hopes to become the first private company to extract resources from the lunar surface and bring them back to Earth.
© Interlune
Helium-3 is scarce on Earth but is abundant on the Moon.
A company wants to mine it and sell it on Earth.
Almost a decade ago, the US Congress passed a law giving private American space companies the rights to the resources they mine on celestial bodies, including the moon.
Now there's a private company that plans to do just that.
The company Interlune, founded by two former executives of the Jeff Bezos-founded space company Blue Origin and an Apollo astronaut, publicly announced on Wednesday (March 13) that it has raised $18 million and is developing the technology to make materials from the moon and bring it back.
(Bezos owns The
Washington Post
.)
Interlune is particularly focused on helium-3, a stable isotope that is scarce on Earth but abundant on the Moon and could be used as fuel in nuclear fusion reactors but could also serve to power the quantum computing industry.
The Seattle-based company has been working on the technology for about four years, at a time when the commercial sector is working with NASA to establish a permanent presence on and around the moon.
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Private company wants to mine helium-3 on the moon
Earlier this year, two commercial spacecraft attempted to land on the moon as part of a NASA program designed to deliver instruments and experiments, and later cargo and rovers, to the lunar surface.
The first attempt by Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh company, suffered a fuel leak and failed to reach the moon.
The second, from Houston-based Intuitive Machines, landed on the moon but arrived too quickly and tipped over.
Still, it was the first American spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon in more than 50 years, and it was the first commercial vehicle to accomplish the feat.
NASA is planning further missions for the coming year, which should not only pave the way for the return of people to the moon, but also enable the private sector to enter commercial operations.
Rob Meyerson, the former president of Blue Origin, co-founded Interlune with Gary Lai, another former Blue executive, and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist who flew to the moon on Apollo 17.
Other founding team members include Indra Hornsby and James Antifaev, who work in the space industry.
In an interview, Meyerson said the company intends to be the first to collect lunar resources, bring them back and then sell them, testing the 2015 law.
There's a lot of demand for helium-3 in the quantum computing industry, which needs to operate some of its systems at extremely low temperatures, and Interlune has already found a "customer that wants to buy lunar resources in bulk," he said.
“We intend to be the first to go commercial and supply and support these customers,” Meyerson said.
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NASA could also be a customer.
In 2020, it sought companies to collect rocks and dirt from the lunar surface and sell them to NASA as part of a technology development program designed to help astronauts "live off Earth."
In a tweet, then-NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote that the agency wanted to “provide regulatory certainty for the extraction and trading of space resources.”
NASA and China want to go to the south pole of the moon
NASA has also said it is in a race to the moon with China.
Both focus on the moon's south pole, where there is water in the form of ice in the permanently shadowed craters there.
However, China has also expressed interest in extracting other resources, including helium-3, which it said was contained in a sample it brought back from the moon in 2020.
Interlune plans to conduct an exploratory mission as early as 2026, flying the harvester aboard a commercial rocket and spacecraft to an area of the moon where large amounts of helium-3 are suspected.
There she would dig through the lunar soil, called regolith, and use a spectrometer to measure the amount of helium-3 she collected.
“The goal is to preserve the data,” Lai said in an interview.
If all goes according to plan, the company hopes to launch another mission in 2028 that will be an “end-to-end demonstration of the entire operation,” Lai said.
To do this, a harvester would have to fly to the moon, pick up the regolith, and its processor would filter out the helium-3.
A small amount would return to the moon and be placed “into the hands of the customer.”
The company wants to start full operations by 2030.
The path to the moon is difficult and expensive
But the path to the moon is difficult - and expensive.
Setting up a mining operation and then bringing the products home is even more difficult.
To be successful, Interlune would rely on a number of startups and technologies that don't yet exist, such as:
B. a lunar rover traversing the surface to excavate regolith.
However, Meyerson said Interlune has a chance to succeed because of the growing demand for helium-3 and advances made in space transportation and technology in recent years.
Interlune has developed extraction technology that is small, lightweight and does not require enormous energy, Meyerson said, making it easier to transport to the moon and operate there.
The company is also betting that as more commercial space companies begin flying to the moon in collaboration with NASA, deliveries to and from the surface will become more common, just as SpaceX now flies crews and cargo to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit.
“We're just starting to get to that operational cadence and we're really building the entire industrial base to go to the moon,” Meyerson said.
The company's funding round was led by venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, whose founder and general partner Alexis Ohanian said the space sector has become much more attractive to investors.
“The space economy is something we can really talk about openly now, and I believe some of the smartest people on the planet are making this effort,” he said.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has unprecedented speed
This is largely due to companies like SpaceX, which is flying its reusable Falcon 9 rocket at an unprecedented pace and is working on its next-generation Starship rocket, which NASA wants to use to take astronauts to the moon.
“We’ve seen how far the technology has come,” Ohanian said.
“It is clear that SpaceX has demonstrated the potential of private companies in this area and demonstrated an excellent business model.
And that frankly opens the door for funds like ours to say, yeah, why not?
We're not investing exclusively in space, but we think it makes sense to make these really ambitious bets on technologies that can potentially create tremendous, tremendous value.
And although it is risky, we have a huge appetite for it.”
He said he was aware that it could take years or longer for a lunar mining company to make money.
But he said that "we're happy to wait a decade or more to see those returns."
To the author
Christian Davenport
covers NASA and the space industry for The Washington Post's Finance Editor.
He has worked for the Post since 2000 and has served as a Metro editor and a military affairs reporter.
He is the author of The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (PublicAffairs, 2018).
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on March 13, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.