A lunar business plan, apparently
In a very quiet corner of space, five autonomous robots are imagined doing what humans have not yet managed to do: working the moon for profit. They would crawl across the surface, scoop up loose rock and dust, process it on the spot, and extract a rare form of helium before sending the finished product back to Earth.
That is the pitch. It sounds like science fiction because, for most of human history, it was. But several companies are now raising money to make lunar resource extraction real, hoping to be first in line for whatever the moon economy turns out to be.
“My view is that it’s not a question of if, it’s a matter of when,” says Rob Meyerson, founder of Seattle-based Interlune, one of the most prominent of the new lunar prospectors.
Meyerson spent years in the space industry, including work on the shuttle programme and a stint helping Jeff Bezos build Blue Origin into a serious aerospace company. Now he is aiming much farther out, about 385,000km farther, and has raised $18m from investors to pursue the idea.
Why Helium-3 has everyone interested
The target is Helium-3, a gas created in the sun and found on Earth only in trace amounts. On the moon, it has been deposited over billions of years by the solar wind. It is already used in medical imaging, and researchers say it could also become useful in quantum computers and, at least in theory, nuclear fusion.
Demand is growing, Meyerson says, but supply is not. That shortage is the basic economic argument for going to the moon in the first place.
“It’s a product that is priced high enough to warrant going to space and bringing it back to Earth,” he says.
The broader timing is convenient, if one uses that word loosely. After 50 years without a human visitor, the moon is suddenly back on the itinerary. Nasa is leading an astronaut fly-by mission this week as part of Artemis, the first mission to send astronauts back since 1972. The agency wants a longer-term presence, including a lunar base. China, meanwhile, is on course for a crewed landing this decade.
With private companies taking a bigger share of the satellite and launch business, deep-space exploration is having something of a comeback. The Apollo era had glamour. This era has pitch decks.
A commercial mining operation would have been nearly impossible 10 years ago. That has changed because private access to space has expanded quickly through companies such as Blue Origin and SpaceX, making off-Earth business look less like fantasy and more like a very expensive spreadsheet.
Multiple international missions are expected to reach the moon in the next few years, and Interlune is not the only company looking at Helium-3. ispace, a Japan-headquartered robotic spacecraft company, has teamed up with Magna Petra, a US start-up that says it is developing an “AI-based” and “non-destructive, energy-efficient recovery of Helium-3 from lunar regolith”.
“We’re betting that the cost of access to the moon will come down,” Meyerson says.
Testing whether the moon actually has enough
Interlune’s leadership includes Harrison Schmitt, the 90-year-old former astronaut who serves as executive chair. Schmitt, the only geologist ever to walk on the moon, was part of Apollo 17, the last crewed US lunar mission in 1972. He has argued for lunar helium mining since the 1980s, which suggests patience is not always dead in the space business.
The biggest practical question is whether there is enough Helium-3 in the lunar regolith to make extraction worthwhile.
Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines, says that concentration matters more than enthusiasm. He compares the idea to trying to mine gold from the ocean.
The sea may contain tiny amounts of gold, he notes, but no company is building a profitable industry around that, because the concentration is too low and the cost to extract it is absurd.
That is why Interlune plans to send a multispectral camera to the lunar south pole later this year, aboard a probe, to measure not just how much Helium-3 is present but how concentrated it is.
The moon is not an empty lot
The more ambitious this all sounds, the more people start asking whether it is a good idea.
Critics say history is full of pioneers who rushed into new frontiers and only later discovered they had damaged places they did not fully understand. The moon, unlike an asteroid drifting somewhere nobody particularly watches, is visible every night. That makes the ethics harder to ignore.
Abbud-Madrid says that when he began studying space mining 25 years ago, the mood was mostly excitement. Now, there are more serious worries about environmental impact.
“The moon has been an object of adoration for millennia. Every civilisation has looked at 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 out of millions. But the moon, you see it every night … Is it OK? That’s a very valid question that has been asked lately, and one that has to be addressed at some point.”
Interlune avoids the word mining entirely, because apparently even the vocabulary has a branding department. Instead, the company talks about “harvesting”, which it says “will unlock unprecedented growth and innovation for the betterment of Earth and humankind”.
The choice of language reflects a real concern: a pristine environment could be altered before scientists fully understand its value. Astronomers also worry that mining could interfere with future research from the lunar surface, which is extremely cold, isolated, and therefore ideal for sensitive instruments.
Scientists have called for protection of certain areas, known as sites of extraordinary scientific importance. These include regions near the poles and the radio-quiet farside, which could be especially useful for deep-space observation.
“We’re not asking to put half the moon or some huge area off limits to 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 small spots on the moon.”
He warned at an astronautical congress last year that “rare valuable real estate is known to be a great cause of disputes and conflicts” and said there remains an urgent unanswered question about how such places would be protected.
The legal vacuum is not just poetic
One of the murkier issues is the law. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says no country can claim ownership of a celestial body such as the moon, but it says nothing specific about commercial activity there. Which is a very on-brand kind of omission for space law.
Meyerson argues there is room for both business and science. “The moon is big,” he says, while adding that Interlune wants to operate “thoughtfully in a way that leaves the site to be used again in the future”.
Still, Interlune is only one player in a broader race to establish a presence on the moon.
China’s Chang’e-6 mission returned samples from the far side of the moon in 2024 that included Helium-3. State media later said the mission’s data would help Beijing estimate the total amount of the gas on the moon, which it described as an “energy source in the future”.
Over the coming decades, the moon may become a miniature version of the geopolitical competition playing out on Earth. Russia, the US, and China all have plans to send probes and humans back.
“We’re watching very closely countries that maybe don’t think the same way that we do, like China, who are operating very, very energetically,” Meyerson says. “I think it’s important that the west and the US have a presence on the moon.”
