Interlune is leveraging a $150,000 NASA contract to develop develop lunar trenching and excavation technology — and although the primary goal is to extract valuable helium-3 from moon dirt, the project also signals the company’s broader play for lunar infrastructure.
Interlune’s work on the Small Business Technology Transfer Phase 1 contract, done in partnership with the Colorado School of Mines, demonstrates that the Seattle-based startup’s business model isn’t limited to helium-3. In the years ahead, the technologies pioneered by Interlune for resource extraction can also be used for building roads, base camps and other construction projects on the moon.
For example, the excavator that’s the focus of the NASA funding — known as the Scalable Implement for Lunar Trenching, or SILT — will support Interlune’ plan to sift through tons of lunar soil. But it will also support NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish a sustainable lunar presence in the 2030s.
“We’re looking at some other tools that would move regolith around, or prepare a site for making a road or building a radiation berm, burying a certain piece of infrastructure like a nuclear reactor,” Interlune CEO Rob Meyerson told GeekWire. “So, we’re very interested in participating in the Artemis program in broader ways, and we think the technology we’re developing for helium-3 extraction can support that.”
Lunar helium-3 extraction leads the list of Interlune’s priorities because Meyerson and the company’s other founders believe that could be a lucrative line of business.
Helium-3 can be used in quantum computers, medical imaging systems, nuclear weapon detectors and even future fusion reactors — but it’s so rare on Earth that it sells for up to $20 million per kilogram. Interlune is betting that it can make a profit by extracting helium-3 that’s deposited on the moon by solar wind.
“In the U.S., we produce one kilogram of helium-3 per year from tritium decay, give or take,” Meyerson said. “On the moon, we intend to extract 10 kilograms of helium-3 per year from our first helium-3 harvesting operation in the 2030s. And if we had helium-3 fusion, we would need 100 kilograms of helium-3 to power a city the size of Seattle for one year.”
The excavator development project builds on work that Interlune has conducted in partnership with Vermeer Corp., an Iowa-based industrial equipment manufacturer. Last year, the two companies unveiled a full-scale prototype for an excavator that would be capable of ingesting 100 metric tons of moon dirt in an hour.
Under the terms of the NASA contract, Interlune and the Colorado School of Mines will focus on optimizing the excavator’s design for the lunar environment and minimizing its power consumption. Work on the current phase of the project is due to wrap up by mid-2026, and if the results are sufficiently positive, Interlune could get the go-ahead for follow-up funding.
Meyerson cited other areas where Interlune’s work on the core technologies for its lunar harvesting system is attracting government support:
- The Texas Space Commission provided a grant of up to $4.8 million to support a facility in Houston that focuses on creating better substitutes for moon rocks and soil. “The first one will be a regolith simulant that has implanted solar wind in it. … And we’re working on a device that will actually implant helium and/or hydrogen into the regolith,” Meyerson said.
- The Department of the Air Force’s AFWERX program granted Interlune a $1.25 million contract to work on a new method to separate helium-3 from domestic helium for use in cooling quantum computers. “We’re working very closely with the Air Force Research Lab, and we’re also working with an industrial gas partner that we haven’t announced yet,” Meyerson said. “We would plug into their helium plant and extract helium-3, and so that’s a very important project for us.”
- NASA’s TechFlights program awarded $348,000 to support reduced-gravity testing of Interlune’s regolith-processing system.
- Interlune won a $246,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work on its soil-sorting technology.
Interlune was founded in 2020 by Meyerson, a former president of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, and other aerospace veterans including Apollo 17 moonwalker Harrison Schmitt. The team has since grown to about 25 employees in Seattle, Houston and Washington, D.C.
So far the company has brought in $18 million in seed funding, and it recently reported raising more funds through a Simple Agreement for Future Equity, or SAFE. “We elected to do this because we wanted to raise some additional money in anticipation of some of these contract awards, like the one we’re talking about today. And we’ve got some more announcements coming,” Meyerson said.
A multispectral camera built by Interlune in partnership with NASA’s Ames Research Center could begin surveying lunar terrain for helium-3 as early as this summer. Interlune says it already has more than half a billion dollars’ worth of purchase orders and government contracts for helium-3.
Meyerson said helium-3 will be a “great first product” for Interlune.
“But once we get established on the moon, and we have all this infrastructure on the moon — excavating and sorting and extracting and separating — we can then start to evolve and add capability to produce water and split that into liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen,” he said. “We can extract metals, rare earths and silicon, and help with construction and excavation, like we’re doing under this NASA contract. Those are all important adjacent services that will help to build the in-space economy. And we think that is going to be huge.”
