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Tag: interlune

  • Former Blue Origin Employees Want to Harvest Helium-3 From the Moon

    Former Blue Origin Employees Want to Harvest Helium-3 From the Moon

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    Over billions of years, the surface of the Moon has been bombarded by solar wind, carrying high-energy particles that include a highly coveted resource, helium-3. Although the element is scarce on Earth, it has recently become in demand by several industries, including those working on quantum computing and nuclear fusion reactors.

    Moon Knight Gives Us Hope

    Helium-3 has been deemed so precious that one company is willing to go all the way to the Moon to get it. Seattle-based startup Interlune recently announced that it raised $15 million in funding as part of its plan to harvest and sell natural resources from the Moon. The company wants to initially focus on harvesting helium-3, which it can sell to government and commercial customers in the national security, quantum computing, medical imaging, and fusion energy industries, according to Interlune.

    “There is growing demand for Helium-3 across burgeoning and potentially massive industries,” Alexis Ohanian, one of the main investors in Interlune’s latest round of funding, said in a statement. “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.”

    Interlune was founded in 2020 by former Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson and former Chief Architect Gary Lai, as well as Harrison Schmitt, the only living member of Apollo 17—NASA’s last crewed mission to the Moon. “For the first time in history, harvesting natural resources from the Moon is technologically and economically feasible,” Meyerson said in a statement.

    Sure it’s feasible, but the company still needs to develop a way to do it. The latest round of funding is a good start, but there’s still a long way to go. Interlune is working on the design of its first robotic lander mission, which will verify the helium-3 levels at the company’s chosen Moon site for its initial operation.

    Although it’s still in its initial phases, Interlune is hoping to launch a new era for the lunar economy, essentially becoming the first to harvest and sell natural resources extracted from the Moon. According to the Space Resource Exploration and Utilization Act, which was passed in 2015, any resource obtained in space is the property of the entity that extracted it.

    The idea of resource mining from the Moon and other celestial objects has been floating around for some time, but very few companies have made any substantial steps towards achieving it. NASA recently announced its own plans to explore harvesting resources from the Moon within the next 10 years to support its Artemis plans, hoping to establish large scale lunar regolith mining by 2032 and extracting resources such as water, iron, and rare metals.

    Space definitely has all the right stuff, but there’s still a lot of groundwork that needs to be done before we can start selling cosmic resources. Since there are no regulations set in place as of yet, there’s also an added risk of the race to extract as much resources as possible, altering the makeup of the Moon or other objects in space.

    For more spaceflight in your life, follow us on X (formerly Twitter) and bookmark Gizmodo’s dedicated Spaceflight page.

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    Passant Rabie

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  • Secretive moon startup led by ex-Blue Origin leaders raises new tranche of funding | TechCrunch

    Secretive moon startup led by ex-Blue Origin leaders raises new tranche of funding | TechCrunch

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    A stealth startup led by ex-Blue Origin leaders, focused on harvesting resources from the moon, has quietly closed a sizable new tranche of funding, according to regulatory documents.

    Interlune, a startup that’s been around for at least three years but has made almost zero public announcements about its tech, has raised $15.5 million in new funding and aims to close another $2 million. A representative for Interlune declined to comment on this story.   

    This is the first public indication that the company has closed any funding since a $1.85 million seed round in 2022.

    Much of what’s known about the startup was reported by GeekWire last October, when Interlune CTO Gary Lai briefly described the startup during a speech at Seattle’s Museum of Flight: “We aim to be the first company that harvests natural resources from the moon to use here on Earth,” he reportedly said. “We’re building a completely novel approach to extract those resources, efficiently, cost-effectively and also responsibly. The goal is really to create a sustainable in-space economy.”

    Lai is an aerospace engineer whose resume includes a 20-year stint at Blue Origin, where he eventually became chief architect for space transportation systems, including launchers and lunar landers. Interlune is being led by Rob Meyerson, an aerospace executive who was president at Blue Origin for 15 years. Meyerson is also a prolific angel investor, with investments in well-known hardware startups including Axiom Space, Starfish Space, Hermeus and Hadrian Automation.

    The filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission also lists attorney H. Indra Hornsby as a company executive. Hornsby previously held the position of general counsel at BlackSky and Spaceflight Industries, and also worked as an executive VP at Rocket Lab.

    What little else is known of Interlune’s tech comes from an abstract of a small SBIR the startup was awarded last year from the National Science Foundation. Under that award, the company said it will aim to “develop a core enabling technology for lunar in situ resource utilization: the ability to sort ‘moon dirt’ (lunar regolith) by particle size.”

    “By enabling raw lunar regolith to be sorted into multiple streams by particle size, the technology will provide appropriate feedstocks for lunar oxygen extraction systems, lunar 3-dimensional printers, and other applications,” the abstract says.

    A growing number of space startups are focusing on what’s known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), or collecting and transforming space resources into valuable commodities. Much of this is driven by NASA’s stated priority to build a long-term human outpost on the moon via its Artemis program: The agency acknowledges that longer-term stays in space will require the ability to generate materials locally — whether that’s to build roads, produce breathable air or even make rocket propellants.

    But it isn’t just startups that are trying to commercialize ISRU tech; last year, Blue Origin announced that it had made solar cells and transmission wires out of a material that’s chemically identical to lunar regolith.

    In its February 2023 announcement on the tech, Blue Origin said, “Learning to live off the land – on the Moon and on Mars – will require extensive collaboration across the ISRU community.” The phrase is echoed in Interlune’s abstract: “The use of the Moon’s resources is a disruptive capability that will enable missions there to ‘live off the land,’ making the development of this technology important for government agencies and industry alike.”

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    Aria Alamalhodaei

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