We just got our first look at a prototype for a novel moon-mining machine.
“When you’re operating equipment on the moon, reliability and performance standards are at a new level,” Rob Meyerson, co-founder and CEO of the Seattle-based startup Interlune, said in a May 7 statement.
The machine is designed to churn up 110 tons (100 metric tons) of lunar dirt, or regolith, per hour to harvest helium-3, a potential fuel source for future fusion reactors. Helium-3 is rare on Earth but is thought to be plentiful on the moon.
“The high-rate excavation needed to harvest helium-3 from the moon in large quantities has never been attempted before, let alone with high efficiency,” Gary Lai, Interlune co-founder and chief technology officer, said in the same statement.
Building the prototype fostered a unique partnership between Interlune and Vermeer, a 70-year-old agriculture and industrial equipment manufacturer. “We’ve been very pleased with the results of the test program to date and look forward to the next phase of development,” Lai added.
Interlune said that excavation is the first step in a planned four-step system to harvest natural resources from space: excavate, sort, extract and separate. The startup went forward with building the full-scale prototype after successfully testing a smaller version of the machine last year.
As a potential game-changing fuel source that could be used in a range of industries in the future, helium-3 — and getting it from the moon to Earth — has been a hot topic for years, and there have been American, Chinese, and Japanese efforts centered around mining the rare helium isotope.
However, the cost of harvesting helium-3 and then delivering it for use on Earth could make it cost-prohibitive as a fuel source in the immediate future, according to Ian Crawford, professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck, University of London.
In 2021, Crawford told Space.com that the “enormous amounts of investment and infrastructure necessary for the mining, extraction and transportation of lunar helium-3” means that energy sources here on Earth may be cheaper for a while.
Interlune and Vermeer are part of a larger wave of companies and organizations that are looking to help pave the way for future industries on and around the moon. For example, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put forth its 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) Capability Study in 2023 and selected 14 companies to provide ideas about how to develop a lunar economy.
