There’s a resource in lunar soil so valuable it could ignite a 21st-century gold rush. At a reported value of $20 million per kilogram, this material is roughly 150 times more valuable than gold due to its potential use in fusion power plants, cooling for quantum computers, and its current use in detecting attempted smuggling of nuclear materials for national security purposes. 

Seattle-based startup Interlune is one of a handful of space resource extraction companies aiming to harness this material to establish a lunar economy. It has designed a prototype to extract it from the moon’s surface and a plan to bring it home.

NASA’s Artemis Program is developing key infrastructure to return to the moon and stay, creating an opportunity for companies like Interlune to bring their own technologies and business plans to the lunar surface.

The company has built a full-scale prototype excavator with the help of Vermeer, makers of industrial and agricultural machinery, that it’s currently testing on Earth. But with the moon’s lower gravity, lack of atmosphere, and unique soil composition, there are several different factors at play that Interlune needs to optimize for.

Interlune says it is also going to be using its Helium-3 extraction process to harvest Helium-3 from Earth, but Earth’s supply of Helium-3 is extremely limited. The primary way Earth’s supply of Helium-3 increases is through the decay of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen used in applications such as nuclear reactors, fusion reactors, and weapons. Tritium itself is also very scarce and expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars per gram.

On the other hand, the Helium-3 on the moon was made by the sun and deposited on the lunar surface via the solar wind over billions of years. Solar wind is a stream of charged particles emitted by the sun that can cause damage to Earthly technologies like power grids, satellites and communication networks. Earth’s magnetic field acts like a powerful shield against the solar wind which benefits us in many ways, but it is also part of what makes Helium-3 so scarce and valuable here on Earth.

Deliveries of Helium-3 are planned to start in 2029, and Interlune already has purchase agreements with companies like Maybell and Bluefors, which need Helium-3 for building the chandelier-like dilution refrigerators that cool quantum computers to near absolute zero so they can function.

To see Interlune’s prototype lunar excavator in action, check out the video in this article.