The Race For Lunar Helium-3: Why One Seattle Startup Might Win Big

Interlune Is Banking On Moon’s Rare Gas To Transform Energy And Security

When Rob Meyerson steered Blue Origin’s operations, he mastered rocket engineering. Now he’s pivoting to something more ambitious: extracting one of the universe’s most valuable resources from 240,000 miles away.

Interlune, a Seattle-based startup, is developing autonomous mining systems to harvest helium-3 from the lunar surface. The business case is compelling—helium-3 trades at approximately $2,500 per liter, or roughly $19 million per kilogram, according to Edelgas Group’s 2024 market assessment. Even a modest operation with five harvesters could theoretically generate 10 kilograms annually, translating to nearly $200 million in potential revenue.

The Technology: Solving An Impossibly Hard Problem

The technical roadmap sounds straightforward but proves extraordinarily complex. Interlune’s approach involves autonomous vehicles that excavate lunar regolith—the loose, abrasive debris covering the moon’s surface—then process it to extract trace amounts of helium-3. The whooshes and high-pitched whines emanating from the company’s ultra-low-temperature distillation lab signal the core innovation: separating helium-3 from the regolith mixture by cooling it beyond negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit, where competing gases liquefy and helium-3 can be isolated.

The challenge is scale. Helium-3 comprises only single to double-digit parts per billion in lunar soil. Meanwhile, the moon’s environment is genuinely hostile—jagged dust sharper than any terrestrial abrasive, temperature swings from 250 degrees Fahrenheit during lunar day to negative 410 degrees at night, and zero maintenance crews on the ground to repair equipment.

Gary Lai, Interlune’s chief technical officer, acknowledges the distillation system represents their “hardest problem, but we’re making a huge amount of progress.”

The Team: Assembling Moon-Shot Expertise

Interlune’s founder roster reads like a who’s who of aerospace. Meyerson leads the company after leaving Blue Origin in 2018. Lai directed Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket program. And the intellectual godfather is Harrison Schmitt, an 89-year-old former Apollo 17 astronaut—the only geologist to walk on the moon. Since the 1980s, Schmitt has championed lunar helium-3 extraction and helped identify equatorial regions where concentrations potentially run two to three times higher than Apollo samples suggested.

The operational partner is equally impressive: Jason Andringa, CEO of Vermeer, a billion-dollar construction-equipment manufacturer that previously supplied NASA Mars rovers. Together, they’ve designed a lightweight harvester (just a couple of tons) engineered to process 100 tons of regolith per hour—a farm-combine style machine that ingests material while traveling.

Market Demand: More Than One Use Case

Helium-3 isn’t hypothetical demand. The Department of Energy signed a 2024 contract with Interlune to purchase 3 liters at market price, deliverable in 2029. Maybell, which manufactures quantum-computer refrigeration systems, committed to buying thousands of liters over the next decade.

Currently, helium-3 comes from tritium decay in nuclear weapons and power plants—yielding less than 20 kilograms annually. Primary uses include:

• Security scanners at ports and border checkpoints (tens of thousands deployed since 9/11)
• Quantum computing cooling (Google, Amazon, IBM rely on it)
• Future fusion energy generation (the ultimate prize: carbon-free power without radiation)

The Business Model: Revenue Before Moon Mining

Interlune demonstrates unusual sophistication by monetizing terrestrial applications before lunar operations launch. The company is partnering with natural-gas helium producers to deploy distillation equipment that extracts trace helium-3 from existing supplies. Potential production: one kilogram annually, worth roughly $20 million.

Additionally, Interlune won a $4.8 million grant from the Texas Space Commission to develop and mass-produce lunar regolith simulant—synthetic moon dirt for testing. Space agencies and private companies eagerly purchase this for equipment validation.

The Funding And Timeline

Interlune has raised $18 million to date, including a $15 million seed round in 2024 led by Seven Seven Six (co-founded by Reddit’s Alexis Ohnanian). Ohnanian’s partner Katelin Hollaway called Interlune’s management “phenomenal” and views lunar helium exploitation as inevitable.

But scale costs money. Industry analyst Chris Dreyer from the Colorado School of Mines estimates the company will need hundreds of millions (not billions) to deploy a complete mining system—five excavators, processing infrastructure, solar arrays, and transportation logistics. Early harvester prototypes might cost around $20 million each, though manufacturing at scale could reduce this substantially.

The 2029 timeline targets SpaceX’s Starship, expected to offer lunar service by the early 2030s with dramatically lower launch costs ($100 million initially, targeting $20 million eventually) and 100-ton payload capacity. Interlune could alternatively use Blue Origin’s lunar lander or smaller alternatives, though this increases launch frequency and expenses.

Critical Unknowns And The Path Forward

Viability hinges on several factors. First, confirming helium-3 concentrations through ground-truth surveys. Interlune is deploying a spectral camera to the moon on an Astrolab rover by year-end to validate remote-imaging interpretations. A 2027 prospecting mission will analyze dirt samples from target locations.

Second, engineering durability. The moon’s jagged regolith historically damaged Apollo spacesuits and equipment seals. Interlune and Vermeer are designing robotically replaceable components and sealed mechanisms inspired by NASA’s rover technology.

Third, economics. Dreyer notes: “I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t make money on the first few times they do this. But over time perhaps they can.”

Why Interlune Might Actually Win

Compared to competitors mining asteroids or water on the moon, Interlune has a decisive advantage: immediate terrestrial monetization pathways. The company is generating revenue from helium-3 extraction and regolith simulation before launching lunar operations. This cash flow buys time and reduces dependence on speculative venture funding cycles.

The team combines irreplaceable expertise—aerospace veterans, geologic lunar knowledge, and industrial-scale manufacturing partnerships. And demand signals are real: government contracts, corporate commitments, and trillion-dollar applications (fusion, quantum computing) create genuine commercial pull rather than speculative hype.

Schmitt, who spent his career advocating for this moment, remains optimistic. “Once there’s a reliable supply, all sorts of new things are going to be possible.”

Whether Interlune reaches the moon first—or profitably—remains an open question. But the fundamentals suggest they’ve assembled the team, capital structure, and market timing to make lunar resource extraction more than science fiction.