Seattle-based Interlune officially lifted the curtain today on its plans to build a robotic harvester that could extract helium-3 from moon dirt and send it back to Earth for applications ranging from quantum computing to fusion power.
Rob Meyerson, a co-founder of the startup and former president of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, told GeekWire that an initial prospecting mission could be launched as early as 2026, with commercial operations beginning in the 2030s.
“For the first time in history, harvesting natural resources from the moon is technologically and economically feasible,” Meyerson said today in a news release. “With our uniquely experienced and qualified team, Interlune is creating the core technologies to extract and process lunar resources responsibly to serve a wide range of customers.”
Today’s announcement confirmed previous reports that Interlune has raised $18 million in seed capital, including angel investments as well as more than $15 million in funding that was reported in a regulatory filing last month.
That funding round was led by Seven Seven Six, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, with participation by other investors including Aurelia Foundry Fund, Gaingels, Liquid 2 Ventures, Shasta Ventures and alumni from the University of Michigan (where Meyerson went to school).
“We invested in Interlune because access to the ample cache of helium-3 and other precious natural resources on the moon and beyond will unlock or accelerate technological advancements currently hindered by lack of supply,” Ohanian said.
Katelin Holloway, a founding partner of Seven Seven Six, will join Interlune’s board of directors. “What captivates me most [about Interlune] is their unique position to transform decades of technological advancements into near-term reality, giving hope that my grandmother and young sons might soon witness history in their shared lifetime,” Holloway said.
In addition to Meyerson, Interlune’s founding team includes Gary Lai, who served as Blue Origin’s chief architect and is now chief technology officer at Interlune; executive chairman Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon as an Apollo 17 astronaut and served a term in the U.S. Senate; chief operating officer Indra Hornsby, an aerospace executive with previous experience at Rocket Lab and BlackSky; and head of product James Antifaev, a tech executive whose resume includes stints at Spaceflight Inc., Alphabet’s Loon venture and Maxar Technologies.
‘This is a big vision’
The first outlines of Interlune’s business plan came to light last October, but today Meyerson delved more deeply into the company’s vision for bringing valuable lunar resources back to Earth. “This is a big vision, but we’re closer than you think,” he told GeekWire. “We’re just at the very beginning, and we’re going to see a ramp-up of operational missions to the moon here in the coming years.”
Interlune aims to take advantage of other companies’ commercial services for delivering payloads to the moon — and eventually bringing lunar materials back to Earth as well. The business plan would also leverage existing efforts to develop lunar rovers — including NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle, or LTV.
Meyerson said the company’s key technologies have to do with excavating, extracting and separating out helium-3 from lunar soil. “The methods we’ve created for that use an order of magnitude less power than the common technologies that NASA has been promoting,” he said. Last year, Interlune won a $246,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work on its soil-sorting technology.
Helium-3 — a stable isotope that’s lighter than the much more common helium-4 that fills up party balloons — has been talked up in recent years as a coolant for quantum computers. It also has national-security applications for detecting nuclear material, and medical applications for lung imaging.
Perhaps the best-known potential use of helium-3 is as a fuel for commercial fusion reactors. For example, Everett, Wash.-based Helion Energy and Princeton Fusion Systems plan to use helium-3 and deuterium in their reactors.
The problem is that helium-3 is extremely rare and expensive on Earth. The price has fluctuated dramatically in recent years. In 2020, the price jumped to more than $2,750 per liter, which would be more than $500,000 an ounce.
That’s why Interlune is looking toward the moon: Helium-3 is more abundant on the lunar surface, thanks to accumulations deposited by the solar wind. Interlune’s robotic harvester would churn through huge volumes of lunar rocks and soil, also known as regolith, to extract the helium-3.
“We process many tons of regolith, and we expect to bring back a few kilograms of gaseous helium-3 back to Earth at a time,” Meyerson said. (For what it’s worth, lunar helium-3 mining was featured in the 2009 sci-fi film “Moon.”)
Meyerson emphasized that Interlune would take a “sustainable and responsible” approach to excavation and extraction. “This area that we’re harvesting will look like a tilled field rather than a strip mine,” he said.
Bottles of helium-3 could be transported from the moon to Earth via reusable space vehicles such as SpaceX’s lunar Starship lander or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander. “We’ll rely on landers being developed by other companies under the Artemis program and CLPS [Commercial Lunar Payload Services] program, depending on the mission,” Meyerson said.
Looking ahead to the 2030s
Meyerson said Interlune’s development plan calls for sending a small-scale prospecting payload to the moon by as early as late 2026 on a commercial lander. That mission would “measure the helium-3 in the lunar soil and demonstrate that we can extract that helium-3, but not bring anything back to Earth,” he said.
A follow-up mission in 2028 would set up a pilot plant to test Interlune’s robotic harvester and demonstrate the ability to send helium-3 back to Earth. “In 2030, we want to deploy our operational plan to do all that at scale, and start to sell to customers in the 2030s,” Meyerson said.
He said the current trends in prices for helium-3 boost his confidence that “we can go to the moon and bring back small amounts of helium-3 to sell to the market, and do it at a positive gross margin, based on our design and our assumptions about our mission architecture.”
Interlune plans to go after other lunar resources as well.
“Over the long term, we’ll use the head start that we created by going after helium-3 to create an in-space economy by selling water, rocket propellants, industrial materials and construction materials to companies doing business in space,” Meyerson said. “I believe in a long-term space economy, and believe strongly that this go-to-market approach, starting with helium-3, is the right way to get there.”
Meyerson says Interlune’s vision meshes with the space vision being pursued by his former employer.
“Blue Origin is going to be a very important partner for what we’re doing,” Meyerson said. “The Blue Alchemist program is focused on producing solar arrays and oxygen. For Blue Moon, they’re going to need hydrogen. They’re going to need other things, and they’re also going to need customers. Interlune can be one of those customers, and we can also be a complementary partner. We look forward to finding ways to work together. We certainly know the company well.”
