Take the rarest material on Earth, put it on the Moon in abundance, give someone the idea to go get it and you have Intermoon. The Seattle company just showed his clear intentions: to extract helium-3 from the lunar soil and bring it back to our planet.
Imagine a backhoe that eats up tons of lunar dirt, extracts the precious isotope, and throws the rest back, all in one continuous motion. Sound crazy? Not for those who have already signed million-dollar contracts to receive the first deliveries by 2029.
Interlune, a prototype that eats regolith
Interlune’s triple announcement finally reveals the cards on the table. First of all, a full-scale prototype of a lunar excavator, developed in collaboration with Vermeer, a company specializing in industrial equipment. Let's not talk about toys: this beast It is designed to ingest 100 tons of lunar dirt every hour., extract the helium-3 and reject the rest onto the lunar surface. A continuous process reminiscent of Earth's mining dredges, but adapted to the Moon's extreme conditions.
The connection with Blue Origin It's clear: the CEO of Interlune, Rob Meyerson, was president of Bezos' company from 2003 to 2018, while the CTO Gary Lai was the chief architect of New shepard (and even flew there in 2022). In short, people who know how things are done in space and who have decided to aim for something more ambitious than a simple suborbital flight.
Customers are already queuing
The second part of the announcement concerns the agreements already signed. The U.S. Department of Energy has reserved three liters of lunar helium-3 for delivery by April 2029, at the current market price. It would be the first purchase of a non-terrestrial natural resource under the auspices of the DOE Isotope Program. A strong signal to the market and investors.
Maybell Quantum Industries went further, signing a contract for thousands of liters to be delivered annually between 2029 and 2035. The company will use them in its dilution refrigerators, which are essential for cooling quantum computing devices to temperatures close to absolute zero.
Helium-3 will fuel a fundamental transformation in computing
Maybell CEO said, Corban Tillemann-Dick, adding that in the next few years we will go from a few hundred quantum computers in the tens of thousands. And they're all going to need helium-3.
A three-phase (lunar) plan
The latest announcement it's about the roadmap. Nina Hooper, director of business development at Interlune, revealed the three-year plan: “Crescent Moon” mission at the end of 2025, with a hyperspectral camera en route to the lunar south pole as a passenger on another mission; “Prospect Moon”, a lander that will land where the concentration of helium-3 is highest to validate extraction methods; finally “Harvest Moon”, the complete demonstration of the extraction process and return to Earth.
The commercial price of helium-3? About $20 million per kilogram, according to Interlune. A market report from Edelgas Group indicates a current price of around $2.500 per liter, significantly lower but still substantial.
Interlune, not only (but almost only) a question of money
Helium-3 is not just a business. This isotope, bombarded on the lunar surface by the solar wind and thus more abundant there than on Earth, has critical applications: quantum computing, fusion energy, medical imaging, weapons detection for national security.
The idea is not new (the 2009 film “Moon” already talked about it), but Interlune is the first to try to commercialize this operation. With 18 million dollars of financing collected last year and a $4,84 million grant from the Texas Space Commission, the means appear to be there. And when Jason Andringa, CEO of Vermeer, talks about “harvesting resources carefully and responsibly to make our world a better place”, making it clear that the ambition goes beyond simple profit.
Although, let's be clear, 20 million per kilo is not a bad motivation.
