WASHINGTON — Interlune, a startup with plans to harvest helium-3 from the moon, will fly an instrument on the first lunar rover from fellow startup Astrolab.
The two companies announced Aug. 5 that Astrolab’s FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) rover will include a multispectral camera provided by Interlune. FLIP is scheduled to launch to the south polar regions of the moon on Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander as soon as the end of this year.
Interlune says that the camera, developed in partnership with NASA’s Ames Research Center, will help the company estimate how much helium-3, an isotope long associated with nuclear fusion reactors, exists in the lunar regolith.
Rob Meyerson, chief executive of Interlune, said in an interview that the instrument will search for ilmenite, a titanium-rich mineral. Concentrations of ilmenite are closely correlated with helium-3, and the mineral can thus serve as a proxy for helium-3. The data from the instrument will augment that collected from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on ilmenite.
“We’re getting first measurements that are up close and higher resolution and that are better than what we have,” he said. “We’ll use those to improve our tools and get us ready to gather more data.”
The instrument has been delivered to Astrolab. Jaret Matthews, chief executive of Astrolab, said it has not yet been installed on the FLIP rover but said it should be integrated, along with other payloads, by September as Astrolab works to complete the vehicle and begin final testing.
The companies are still working on operations of the instrument once on the surface. Meyerson suggested Interlune would be happy getting any data that the camera can provide of the lunar surface, even though the south polar region of the moon does not figure into the company’s long-term plans for extracting helium-3.
“We’re going to measure the surface area that we can see which is, which is where the FLIP rover is going to go,” he said. “We’re going to take measurements and learn as much as we can from this.”
“They’re sort of a ride-along. The whole mission is sort of a mission of opportunity,” said Matthews. Astrolab plans to drive FLIP to a “hibernation zone” in a bid to survive the lunar night. “To the extent that they’re on and taking data as we’re traversing towards the hibernation zone, that works for them.”
High demand for helium-3
Flying the camera on FLIP is a precursor for Interlune’s first dedicated mission. That mission, slated for launch in 2027, will be a prospecting effort to better quantify helium-3 concentrations on the moon. It will go to what Meyerson called one of several “idealized harvesting sites” based on Apollo and LRO data.
Data from the camera on FLIP “will roll into that and help us refine our selection process” for the prospecting mission landing site, he said. That mission is in the design phase, with Interlune working to select a commercial lander mission for it.
The company has also been working to find customers for any helium-3 it can extract from the moon. Interlune announced in May an agreement with the Department of Energy, which will purchase three liters of lunar helium-3 no later than 2029, and a separate agreement with Maybell Quantum, a quantum computing company, who will purchase thousands of liters of helium-3 annually from 2029 to 2035.
While helium-3 has traditionally been associated with fusion reactors still in development, Meyerson said the company is seeing strong interest for it in other applications, like medical imaging and quantum computing. “That’s one of the positive surprises of this,” he said. “The demand for helium-3 for quantum computing has been larger than we expected.”
The demand is so strong, he said, that Interlune is considering augmenting the helium-3 it eventually extracts from the moon with that sourced terrestrially. “We have a team here in Seattle that’s working on all the options to serve our customers, some space-based from the moon and some of them from Earth.”
He said some of the same technologies that could be used to extract helium-3 from terrestrial sources, like in natural gas, would also apply to the moon. However, he argued that terrestrial supplies won’t be sufficient in the long run to meet projected demand.
“If you were to process every molecule of helium-3 on earth from the terrestrial gas supply, you might double the global supply of helium-3, but you wouldn’t grow it to the levels that we’re seeing demand from for quantum computing,” he said. “We need a stronger helium-3 supply chain, and you can’t really get there without going to the moon.”
Interlune, with about 25 employees today, is funded by an $18 million seed round announced in March 2024. Meyerson said the company is working on a Series A round.
Astrolab progress
The Interlune camera is one of several payloads that will be flying on FLIP. Matthews said there will be several NASA payloads on the rover as well as commercial ones that Astrolab will be announcing in the coming weeks.
“Generally, there’s a theme around understanding the impact of lunar dust,” he said of the payloads. They include dust mitigation coatings and sealing technologies. “But the primary objective for us is really to elevate the technology readiness level of our critical subsystems for FLEX,” the company’s larger lunar rover.
Astrolab announced plans to develop FLIP last October, calling it a technology demonstrator for the larger FLEX rover. In February, Astrolab announced FLIP would go to the moon on Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander. FLIP replaces NASA’s VIPER rover, which the agency cancelled last year.
The 500-kilogram FLIP rover can carry 30 kilograms of payload, and Matthews said the rover was quickly booked with payloads from Interlune and others. “We filled up very quickly. It was surprisingly fast, especially because we didn’t really start talking about the mission publicly until about February.”
Astrolab is working to complete FLIP and deliver it to Florida to be integrated with Griffin for a launch on a Falcon Heavy as soon as the end of the year, although Matthews noted the schedule will depend on the readiness of the full lander.
“Astrobotic and SpaceX will decide exactly what is the launch date,” he said. “We’re working really hard to be ready and not be the tall tent pole there, and so we’re pushing hard to be ready for the end of year.”
The work on FLIP will aid in the development of FLEX, including a version that Astrolab has been developing for NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) Services program. Astrolab was one of three companies selected last April to work on initial designs for the LTV.
Matthews said the company had completed that initial work, which concluded with a preliminary design review. The company is now preparing a proposal for the next phase, which will cover development of the cover and initial services. He said he expects NASA to make an award for that phase in mid-November.
“We’re really excited. We think we have a good offering, a compelling story,” he said. “Through the work on FLIP, we really advanced a lot of the core technologies. The FLIP mission has really pushed every corner of the business to a higher level.”