Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it’s working with partners in Luxembourg on a campaign called Project Oasis, which aims to identify and take advantage of valuable resources on the moon.
The project’s first mission, known as Oasis-1, will send a small satellite into lunar orbit to map reserves of water ice, helium-3, radionuclides, rare earth elements, precious metals and other materials that could be used by space settlers or sent back to Earth.
“Once we know what’s really there and how to access it, everything changes,” Pat Remias, vice president for advanced concepts and enterprise engineering at Blue Origin, said today in a news release. “Project Oasis creates the foundation for a thriving space economy that benefits everyone, including the billions of individuals on Earth who will benefit from space-based resources.”
Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin has already been working on a project called Blue Alchemist, which focuses on technologies that can process moon dirt to produce the components for solar cells and transmission wires. Another promising avenue involves turning deposits of water ice into drinkable water — and turning that H2O into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellant.
Such technologies could be applied broadly to in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU, on the moon as well as on Mars and in asteroid mining operations.
Luxembourg officials have long been supportive of off-Earth resource extraction as a potential frontier for space commercialization. Back in 2017, members of Luxembourg’s royal family visited Seattle to strengthen ties related to space technology. Luxembourg’s government and one of the country’s leading banks, SNCI, invested $26.5 million in Planetary Resources, a Redmond, Wash.-based asteroid mining venture that fizzled out in 2018.
Project Oasis is being developed jointly by Blue Origin’s Space Resources Center of Excellence, located in the Los Angeles area, and by the company’s international office in Luxembourg. Blue Origin’s partners include Luxembourg and its national space agency; GOMSpace, a satellite company that has its headquarters in Denmark and a subsidiary in Luxembourg; and the European Space Resources Innovation Center, which is based in Luxembourg.
Oasis-1 would employ neutron spectroscopy to quantify the moon’s subsurface water ice concentrations to a depth of 1 meter (3 feet). Additional instruments would include magnetometers for metal detection, and multispectral imaging for helium-3 detection and geological mapping. Controlled impact sequences would maximize data collection for identifying potential extraction sites.
Blue Origin hasn’t yet specified the timeline for Oasis-1 or any follow-up missions for Project Oasis. But for what it’s worth, Seattle-based Interlune, a moon mining venture that was co-founded by Blue Origin veterans, is planning to send a camera to the lunar surface sometime in the next few months to map concentrations of helium-3.
