Lunar prospectors: the businesses looking to mine the moon | Space
In the silent void of space, five autonomous robots roam the lunar surface, digging through a loose layer of rock and dust and leaving rows of uniform tracks in their wake.
Stopping only to recharge at a central solar power plant, the car-sized machines process lunar dirt internally to extract a type of helium so rare on Earth that a palm-sized container is estimated to be worth millions. Once processed, the precious resource is loaded into a launcher and ejected towards Earth.
This vision is born from science fiction, but several companies are already raising money to exploit the resources of Earth’s neighbor, in a race to be the first to benefit from the burgeoning lunar economy.
“My view is that it’s not a question of if, but rather a question of when,” says Rob Meyerson, founder of Seattle-based Interlune, one of several 21st century lunar prospectors.
Meyerson worked on the space shuttle program but left NASA to help Jeff Bezos transform his space company, Blue Origin, from a small experiment into a major aerospace player. However, his next ambition is around 385,000 km away and he has raised $18 million from investors.
The Moon has extremely rare resources, and Meyerson focuses on helium-3, a gas produced by the Sun and found only in trace amounts on Earth. Deposited on the surface of the Moon over billions of years by the solar wind, it is used in medical imaging but it has qualities that could become vital in quantum computers and, in theory, in nuclear fusion.
While demand for helium-3 is increasing, Meyerson says, the available supply is extremely limited. “It’s a product that’s priced high enough to justify going to space and bringing it back to Earth,” he says.
After 50 years without any human visitors, the Moon is in vogue again, with NASA leading an astronaut flyby mission this week. The Artemis voyage is the first to return astronauts since 1972 and is part of a series of missions that the US space agency says will result in a permanent human presence, including a lunar base. China, meanwhile, is poised to conduct a crewed moon landing this decade.
And with private companies rather than governments operating in the satellite business, deep space exploration is enjoying a renaissance, bringing new energy not seen since the days of the Apollo program.
A commercial Moon mining operation would not have been feasible a decade ago, but the explosive growth of private access to space through companies such as Blue Origin or its competitor SpaceX has made off-Earth commerce increasingly possible.
Several international missions are expected to land on the Moon in the coming years, and Interlune is not the only company investigating helium-3. ispace, a robotic spacecraft company headquartered in Japan, has teamed up with another US-based startup called Magna Petra, which claims to be developing an AI-based “non-destructive, energy-efficient recovery of helium-3 from lunar regolith”.
“We’re betting that the cost of getting to the Moon will go down,” says Meyerson.
He partnered with 90-year-old former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who serves as executive chairman. The only geologist to have walked on the Moon, as part of the last crewed American mission, Apollo 17 in 1972, Schmitt has been campaigning for lunar helium mining since the 1980s.
Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Space Resources Center at the Colorado School of Mines, says the key to the feasibility of helium-3 extraction will be whether lunar regolith has a high enough concentration of the element.
The professor gives the metaphor of “gold in the ocean”: the sea is filled with millions of tons of tiny grains of gold floating but no company is trying to extract it. For what? “It is found in extremely low concentrations, so the cost of extracting it is not even comparable to the price of gold,” Abbud-Madrid said.
That’s why Interlune will send a multispectral camera to the lunar south pole on a probe later this year, to assess not only quantities but also concentrations of helium-3.
“Object of Worship”
But this new pioneering spirit around extracting resources from the Moon raises questions about whether it’s the right thing to do ethically. Critics say history is full of pioneers who rushed to unknown frontiers, only to realize too late that they had caused irreparable damage to environments they did not fully understand.
Abbud-Madrid says that when he started studying space mining 25 years ago, it was mostly enthusiasm, but now questions of environmental impact are increasingly being asked.
“The Moon has been an object of worship for millennia. Every civilization has viewed the Moon as a place with philosophical and religious connotations,” he said. “You can go to an asteroid and destroy it, do whatever you want – it’s just one asteroid in millions. But the moon, you see it every night… Is that OK? That’s a very valid question that’s been asked lately, and will have to be addressed at some point.”
Interlune does not use the word mining, which has destructive connotations, but instead says it envisions a “harvest,” which it says will “unlock unprecedented growth and innovation for the good of Earth and humanity.”
This wording is deliberate amid growing fears that humanity could destroy a pristine environment. Astronomers also warned that mining operations would affect future prospects for carrying out important scientific research from the lunar surface, which is extremely cold and isolated, and therefore considered a prime location for sensitive equipment.
Scientists have called for the protection of certain areas known as sites of extraordinary scientific importance, including areas at the poles and on the radio-quiet far side, which could be ideal for observing deep space.
“We’re not asking to ban half the Moon or a huge area from commercial or exploration activities,” said Martin Elvis, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. “We’re just asking for a few little spots on the moon.”
Speaking at an astronautics conference last year, he warned that “rare and valuable real estate is known to be a great cause of dispute and conflict” and that there remained an urgent and unanswered question about how such sites are properly protected.
Among these concerns is the opaque legal aspect of Moon mining: a 1967 Outer Space Treaty clearly states that no country can claim ownership of a celestial body such as the Moon, but it makes no reference to commercial activities.
Meyerson says there is room for businesses and scientists in the lunar age. “The moon is big,” he says, but adds that their team wants to operate “in a thoughtful way, so that the site can be reused in the future.”
But Intermoon is just one player in the global race to establish a presence on the Moon. China’s Chang’e-6 mission successfully brought back samples from the far side of the Moon in 2024, which contained helium-3. State media reported that the mission’s data would help Beijing estimate the total amount of helium-3 on the Moon, which it described as an “energy source of the future.”
Over the coming decades, the Moon is expected to become a microcosm of power struggles here on Earth, with the world’s major powers – Russia, the United States and China – all having ambitious plans to return space probes and humans to the Moon.
“We’re watching very closely countries that maybe don’t think the same way as us, like China, which is acting very, very forcefully,” says Meyerson. “I think it’s important that the West and the United States have a presence on the Moon.”
