Moon launches are having a moment. But can you -2-

It's not a wholly original idea. Max Space co-founder Maxim de Jong helped design and build the first two expandable habitats to go to space in the early 2000s for the now-defunct Bigelow Aerospace, and a third was built on de Jong's architecture, according to Max Space.

According to Miyan, his company's job is to house everything that other companies may need on the moon, such as data centers or research labs, as well as facilities needed to sustain human life, like greenhouses. He's not worried about competition with industry titans like SpaceX because, in his view, the "only way" to reach the moon is through collaboration.

"No one company is going to get all of that business," Miyan said. "The scale is too much. There's too much risk for any company ... to put all of their proverbial eggs in one basket."

Getting to the moon is the first step. The next is making it suitable for human life. Then comes commercialization. A big part of that could be mining the moon for natural resources, such as water or rarer materials, including helium-3, an isotope that can be used as a cooling agent in quantum computing and that might provide somewhat cheap and clean fusion energy.

That's the goal of Interlune, a startup founded by Blue Origin veterans that has raised at least $18 million to mine and extract resources on the moon and ship them back to Earth. It's focused on helium-3 to start with, since the gas is rare on the Earth but expected to be found in greater abundance on the moon.

Exactly how much is there is unknown - and often disputed - but Interlune said the moon has more than 1 million metric tons of helium-3. Just about 100 kilograms of helium-3 is available on Earth, according to a 2021 NASA study. A single kilogram is about one-thousandth of a metric ton, and each kilogram of helium-3 costs about $20 million, according to Interlune.

The company already has a contract with Bluefors Cryocooler Technologies to provide up to 10,000 liters of helium-3 a year from 2028 to 2039, while the Energy Department has also agreed to buy three liters delivered no later than April 2029. Maybell Quantum Industries also wants to buy thousands of liters of helium-3 annually from 2029 to 2035. Each liter costs a little less than $3,000, according to Interlune. There are about 7,500 liters of helium-3 in a kilogram, according to reporting from the Washington Post.

"It is the only element in the universe that's priced high enough to warrant going to space and bringing it back to Earth," said Rob Meyerson, the CEO of Interlune and former president of Blue Origin.

Meyerson told MarketWatch that his seed-stage startup expects to begin extracting helium-3 in the 2030s. Interlune plans to estimate how much helium-3 is in the lunar regolith - that is, moon debris - through a lunar rover mission carried out with Astrolab in 2028. In the meantime, Interlune is testing an autonomous excavator and building a research factory in Texas.

Not everyone is fully on board, however - including Isaacman, whose ambitious plans involve developing a lunar nuclear reactor by 2030. The NASA chief recently told the New York Times that he doesn't know of "anything on the moon right now" that will be easier or cheaper to mine and manufacture than what's currently available on Earth.

"I don't have anything immediate to point to and say, this will make economic sense in the moon other than this is directionally correct," he told the Times in a video posted on Feb. 26. "But I am hopeful and I would guarantee we will find things in space that have enormous economic value."

-William Gavin

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04-01-26 1005ET