US company intends to be first to mine the Moon
Nearly a decade ago, the United States Congress passed a law that allows private American space companies the rights to resources they mine on celestial bodies, including the Moon. Now there’s a private venture which says it intends to do just that.
Founded by a pair of former executives from Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, and an Apollo astronaut, the company, Interlune, announced itself publicly yesterday by saying it had raised US$18 million (NZ$29m) and was developing the technology to harvest and bring materials back from the Moon. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Specifically, Interlune is focused on Helium-3, a stable isotope that is scarce on Earth but plentiful on the Moon and could be used as fuel in nuclear fusion reactors as well as helping to power the quantum computing industry.
The company, based in Seattle, has been working for about four years on the technology, which comes as the commercial sector is working with Nasa on its goal of building an enduring presence on and around the Moon.
Rob Meyerson, the former president of Blue Origin, co-founded Interlune with Gary Lai, another former executive at Blue, and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist who flew to the Moon during the Apollo 17 mission.
Also on the founding team are space industry executives Indra Hornsby and James Antifaev.
Meyerson said the company intended to be the first to collect, return and then sell lunar resources, and test the 2015 law.
There is a large demand for Helium-3 in the quantum computing industry, which requires some of its systems to operate in extremely cold temperatures. Interlune had already lined up a “customer that wants to buy lunar resources in large quantities”, Meyerson said.
Nasa might want to be a customer as well. In 2020, it said it was looking for companies to collect rocks and dirt from the lunar surface and sell them to Nasa as part of a technology development programme that would eventually help astronauts “live off the land”.
Nasa has also said it is in a space race to the Moon with China. Both are focused on the lunar south pole, where there is water in the form of ice in the permanently shadowed craters there.
But China has also said that it is interested in extracting other resources, including Helium-3, which it said was present in a sample it returned from the Moon in 2020.
Interlune intends to conduct a prospecting mission as early as 2026, when it would fly its harvester on a commercial rocket and spacecraft to an area of the Moon believed to hold vast quantities of Helium-3.
Once there, it would dig through the lunar soil, or regolith, as it is known, and, using a spectrometer, measure the amount of Helium-3 collected.
If that goes as planned, the company hopes to launch another mission in 2028 that would be an “end-to-end demonstration of the entire operation”, Lai said.
This would entail flying a harvester to the Moon. It would scoop up the regolith, and its processor would separate out the Helium-3. A small quantity would be returned to Earth and be put “into the hands of the customer”.
By 2030, the company intends to conduct full-scale operations.
But getting to the Moon is difficult – and expensive.
Interlune had developed an extraction technology that was small, light and did not require an enormous amount of power, Meyerson said, making it easier to transport to the Moon and to operate there.
The company is also betting that as more commercial space ventures begin flying to the Moon in partnership with Nasa, deliveries to and from the lunar surface will become more common, the way SpaceX now flies crew and cargo to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit.
“We’re really building the whole industrial base around going to the Moon,” Meyerson said.