Is the Moon Worth Mining?

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SSince time immemorial, the moon has sparked something in humanity: love, desire, wonder, fear and so much more. We can now add one more human emotion to those that our bright celestial neighbor extracts from us: greed.

Astronomers have long known that the Moon and its thin outer layer of soil, called regolith, contain a wealth of potentially useful resources. Today, businesses are clamoring for their slice of the moon pie in hopes of converting the lunar dust into a steady stream of profits.

More recently, the most sought-after raw material on the Moon appears to be helium-3, a stable isotope of the rare gas that solar winds have deposited on the Moon in quantities that far exceed those found on Earth. Helium-3 could serve as fuel for future nuclear fusion reactors and, more immediately, as a crucial component of the high-tech refrigerators needed to cool quantum computers.

Recently, Bluefors, a Finland-based cryogenics company, signed a $300 million deal with a lunar resource mining startup called Interlune to purchase up to 265 gallons of helium-3 per year between 2028 and 2037. On the heels of that deal, Blue Origin, the aerospace company launched by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced plans to map complex the resources hosted by the Moon, including helium-3, water ice and a multitude of rare earth elements and precious metals. The Moon is also known to be abundant in many elements, including iron, oxygen and silicon.

Read more: »The moon is full of money»

But while companies and countries race to mine the Moon, making such ventures financially feasible is another matter entirely. “The race to the new moon will not be won by the nation that plants boots and flags on the lunar surface,” Mustafa Bilal, a research assistant at the Islamabad-based Center for Aerospace and Security, wrote in a recent statement. SpaceNews piece, “but by the one who builds the infrastructure to maintain a long-term presence and reap the economic dividends.”

The fact is that it is incredibly expensive to travel to the Moon, especially on a spacecraft loaded with the heavy equipment that would be needed to extract the resources, let alone transport those remains and machinery to Earth. A 2004 estimate estimated that it costs about $1,000 per pound for a round trip from Earth to the lunar surface. And it’s probably pretty low.

With technology evolving at a breakneck pace, the Moon’s days as a distant heartstring factor are likely numbered. Let’s just hope that any extraction of its wealth will leave a little something that will continue to grab our attention like a large pizza.

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Main image: NASA/JPL

• Bob Grant

  Published on November 6, 2025

  Bob Grant is the associate editor of Nautilus.