A SEATTLE-BASED STARTUP wants to redefine the concept of a Harvest Moon. Interlune, launched in 2020 by former Blue Origin executives, develops excavation equipment and technology to mine the moon for an extremely valuable and rare helium isotope—and already has customers lined up, including the U.S. government.
“At $20 million a kilogram, helium-3 is the only resource in the universe that is priced high enough to warrant going to space and bringing it back to Earth,” Interlune cofounder and CEO Rob Meyerson told Newsweek. “We felt like...we can make the economics work and that’s where we are today.”
If successfully extracted from lunar soil, or regolith, where Interlune estimates up to a million metric tons is concentrated, the abundance of helium-3 could revolutionize a number of industries, including quantum computing,…