Interlune, a natural resources company, has announced that the U.S. Department of Energy Isotope Program (DOE IP) has agreed to purchase three liters of helium-3 harvested from the Moon for delivery on Earth at approximately today’s commercial market price. The delivery date is no later than April 2029.
The agreement marks the first DOE Isotope Program purchase of a non-terrestrial natural resource. Interlune will harvest the helium-3 from the lunar soil, or regolith, and return it to Earth for the DOE IP and other customers using the fully operational infrastructure of its pilot plant on the Moon’s surface.
Helium-3, an isotope of helium, is extremely scarce on Earth but abundant on the Moon. Government and industry have been looking for a new and scalable source of helium-3 since the U.S. government addressed a severe shortage around 2010. The isotope is used in applications such as weapons detection in national security, cooling systems necessary for quantum computing, medical imaging, and developing clean fusion energy.
Rob Meyerson, co-founder and CEO of Interlune, said “This inaugural purchase of lunar helium-3 from Interlune demonstrates the crucial need for a larger supply of this resource here on Earth. We look forward to continued collaboration with the DOE IP and other government agencies to incentivize Interlune and other companies to provide key isotopes for our nation and to create a long-term in-space economy.”
Three liters of helium-3 is a sizable enough quantity to require extracting and separating it from the regolith while on the Moon instead of transporting the regolith back to Earth for processing here. To extract three liters of helium-3, Interlune will have to process enough lunar regolith to fill a large backyard swimming pool.
“This amount is too large to return to Earth,” added Meyerson. “Processing this amount of regolith requires us to demonstrate our operations at a useful scale on the Moon.”
While the Interlune business plan is initially focused on transporting lunar helium-3 back to Earth for government and commercial customers, in the future, it will also provide other lunar-derived resources for use in space to advance further space exploration.
“With this agreement, the DOE IP is signaling to companies and investors that it supports novel approaches to securing critical materials for use on Earth, including space resources,” continued Meyerson.
The Interlune harvesting system includes novel technologies for excavating, sorting, extracting, and separating industrial quantities of helium-3 and other resources from lunar soil or regolith.
Earlier this year, Interlune announced $18 million in seed funding. Last Fall, Interlune announced a research grant from the DOE IP to study novel technologies to separate helium-3 from domestic helium supplies using extremely cold temperatures. The company will also leverage findings from this project to support its lunar helium-3 extraction plans.
In addition to the DOE IP research grant, the company received a NASA TechFlights grant to advance its proprietary technology to process lunar soil and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award to develop technology to sort lunar regolith. The company is planning several missions to the Moon later this decade.