Can Interlune Mine Helium-3 on the Moon? (msn.com) 67
The Washington Post reports:
Nearly a decade ago, Congress passed a law that allows private American space companies the rights to resources they mine on celestial bodies, including the moon.
Now, there's a private venture that says it intends to do just that.
Founded by a pair of former executives from Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, and an Apollo astronaut, the company, Interlune, announced itself publicly Wednesday by saying it has raised $18 million and is developing the technology to harvest and bring materials back from the moon... Specifically, Interlune is focused on Helium-3, a stable isotope that is scarce on Earth but plentiful on the moon and could be used as fuel in nuclear fusion reactors as well as helping power the quantum computing industry.
The company, based in Seattle, has been working for about four years on the technology, which comes as the commercial sector is working with NASA on its goal of building an enduring presence on and around the moon... Rob Meyerson, the former president of Blue Origin, co-founded Interlune with Gary Lai, another former executive at Blue, and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist who flew to the moon during Apollo 17... In an interview, Meyerson said that the company intends to be the first to collect, return and then sell lunar resources and test the 2015 law. There is a large demand for Helium-3 in the quantum computing industry, which requires some of its systems to operate in extremely cold temperatures, and Interlune has already lined up a "customer that wants to buy lunar resources in large quantities," he said.
"We intend to be the first to go commercialize and deliver and support those customers," he said. NASA might want to be a customer as well. In 2020, it said it was looking for companies to collect rocks and dirt from the lunar surface and sell them to NASA as part of a technology development program that would eventually help astronauts "live off the land...." The company's funding round was led by the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, whose founder and general partner, Alexis Ohanian, said that the space sector has become far more appealing to investors. "The space economy is something we can actually talk about with a straight face now, and I think some of the smartest people on the planet are making those efforts," he said...
He said he was aware that it might take years, or longer for a moon mining business to make money. But he said that, "we're comfortable waiting for a decade plus to see those returns."
NASA is planning more missions like the Intuitive Machines landing earlier this year, according to the article, "which it says will not only help pave the way for humans to return to the moon but for private industry to begin commercial operations there as well." Interlune plans "a prospecting machine" as soon as 2026, followed by an "end-to-end demonstration" in 2028 that harvests and returns a small quanity of Helium-3, and then full-scale operations by 2030.
"China has also said that it is interested in extracting other resources, including Helium-3, which it said was present in a sample it returned from the moon in 2020."
Now, there's a private venture that says it intends to do just that.
Founded by a pair of former executives from Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos, and an Apollo astronaut, the company, Interlune, announced itself publicly Wednesday by saying it has raised $18 million and is developing the technology to harvest and bring materials back from the moon... Specifically, Interlune is focused on Helium-3, a stable isotope that is scarce on Earth but plentiful on the moon and could be used as fuel in nuclear fusion reactors as well as helping power the quantum computing industry.
The company, based in Seattle, has been working for about four years on the technology, which comes as the commercial sector is working with NASA on its goal of building an enduring presence on and around the moon... Rob Meyerson, the former president of Blue Origin, co-founded Interlune with Gary Lai, another former executive at Blue, and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist who flew to the moon during Apollo 17... In an interview, Meyerson said that the company intends to be the first to collect, return and then sell lunar resources and test the 2015 law. There is a large demand for Helium-3 in the quantum computing industry, which requires some of its systems to operate in extremely cold temperatures, and Interlune has already lined up a "customer that wants to buy lunar resources in large quantities," he said.
"We intend to be the first to go commercialize and deliver and support those customers," he said. NASA might want to be a customer as well. In 2020, it said it was looking for companies to collect rocks and dirt from the lunar surface and sell them to NASA as part of a technology development program that would eventually help astronauts "live off the land...." The company's funding round was led by the venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, whose founder and general partner, Alexis Ohanian, said that the space sector has become far more appealing to investors. "The space economy is something we can actually talk about with a straight face now, and I think some of the smartest people on the planet are making those efforts," he said...
He said he was aware that it might take years, or longer for a moon mining business to make money. But he said that, "we're comfortable waiting for a decade plus to see those returns."
NASA is planning more missions like the Intuitive Machines landing earlier this year, according to the article, "which it says will not only help pave the way for humans to return to the moon but for private industry to begin commercial operations there as well." Interlune plans "a prospecting machine" as soon as 2026, followed by an "end-to-end demonstration" in 2028 that harvests and returns a small quanity of Helium-3, and then full-scale operations by 2030.
"China has also said that it is interested in extracting other resources, including Helium-3, which it said was present in a sample it returned from the moon in 2020."
Good luck (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Did you know that driving to work risks dying in a car accident, and for nothing more than profit? Being safe leads to accomplishing nothing and then dying horribly of cancer and senility. Clearly, safety is unsafe.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Well, in this case I doubt the people behind this even intend to pay the investors back.
Technically I think generating an engineering surplus (more electricity than we put in) with 2H - 3He fusion is much more feasible that 2H - 3H fusion. But to pay investors back, you need to generate an *economic* surplus. And that's going to be next to impossible.
First of all, you need to design and build a fusion power plant along lines that largely have only been explored theoretically. Then you need to build a min
Re: (Score:3)
Assuming they are actually private and want to build something so wildly unlikely to be profitable...we'll use their designs and concepts later when it might be profitable, have at.
Now the safety of having them launch rockets is perhaps a valid concern, but space resource exploitation won't happen from gov't funding for a long long long time. This
Re: (Score:2)
Well, yeah, that's how this works. It's like a game in which different investor's groups bet on how soon a technology will be economically feasible. Early bettors lose everything, but later players benefit from the money they spent and lost. You want to bet late enough to benefit from all that lost investment but not so late you're trying to catch up with competitors with first mover advantage and war chest of intellectual property you have to work around.
So if you're investing money *now* in something
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
2023-2008: 12,026
No bad at all (fac), unless you are one of them. And this includes the year(s) of low travel because of covid. Profits over safety is very normal, it's not like I'm saying something even close to extreme or even controversial, unless you work at Boeing. So what's your point?
Re: (Score:1)
He-3 is not all that abundant on the moon (Score:2)
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_resources#Helium-3):
Materials on the Moon's surface contain helium-3 at concentrations estimated between 1.4 and 15 parts per billion (ppb) in sunlit areas, and may contain concentrations as much as 50 ppb in permanently shadowed regions. For comparison, helium-3 in the Earth's atmosphere occurs at 7.2 parts per trillion (ppt).
OK, so He-3 is perhaps a factor of 1000 more abundant on the moon than on the Earth. It's still way less than one part per million
Re: (Score:1)
Even if you had Helium 3, and it cost cents per kg to mine, process and get back to earth, does anyone have a reactor that could actually generate more electricity than it consumes?
Last time I checked, fusion reactors such as were barely making physics break-even, and very far from engineering break even let alone economic break even when they could actually be run at a cost that is competitive with alternative energy sources.
Best I have heard of so far was NIF, which has exceeded physics break even, but i
Re: (Score:2)
Re: He-3 is not all that abundant on the moon (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Correct. We still struggle with D-T fusion. The Coulomb barrier is orders of magnitude higher with D-3He fusion (which isn't in practice actually aneutronic, just low neutronicity, due to side reactions). Neutronicity simply is not a problem with fusion (you deal with low-Z materials of your choice, so you can readily ensure that there's no long-lived waste created - plus, neutron fluxes are *useful*); it's the Coulomb barrier that's the problem. And if you could overcome such high Coulomb barriers, why
Re: (Score:2)
Or to put it another way: if the entire mass of a fully loaded SpaceX Starship were made of lunar regolith, and you raised it all to over 1000 degrees, and outgassed 100% of the helium, then losslessly extracted all of the 3He from that, the amount you'd have would weigh the same as 3-4 postage stamps.
Do we even need to discuss the consumables for your industrial processes (let alone the humans present) to do this, and how much they'll cost to send to the moon?
On Earth, Helium 3 sells for $2500 per litre (i
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
2500 $/l / 59 g/l = 42,37 $/g ~= $40/g
But maybe I've incorrectly assumed liquid when I should have assumed gas. The numbers would make more sense that way. I hate the notion of measuring bottled gases by the litre since the number changes based on the pressure and temperature, but I know people do that :P
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:He-3 is not all that abundant on the moon (Score:5, Informative)
OK, so He-3 is perhaps a factor of 1000 more abundant on the moon than on the Earth. It's still way less than one part per million. Is the juice really worth the squeeze, or is this venture more accurately described as a way of mining naive investors?
One kilogram of He-3 is enough to produce around 9*10^7 kWh of energy. If we assume a very lousy 20% conversion efficiency, and a low wholesale prices of 5 cents per kWh, it's going to be around $10 million USD in gross profit. So a haul of 50 kilograms will be worth around $500 million.
That 50 kilograms will require processing around a million tons of regolith. So to be profitable, you probably need to keep it way below $500 per ton. This seems doable in theory, but practical challenges are going to be pretty steep.
Re: (Score:2)
Meh, fast reactors aren't cheap either. They're actually very expensive. Fuel efficiency isn't the big deal with fission, it's a minor share of the costs (as is waste disposal). Your big costs are capital, and fission has struggled with that, due to how insanely toxic everything it creates is, with the isotopes in question spanning the entire periodic table's worth of chemical properties. Which mandates equally strong efforts to prevent their release. Because nuclear disasters themselves, while not hig
Can I mine the White House lawn (Score:2)
Can I mine the White House lawn? It's not my property, but my neighbor Mike said he didn't care if I did it.
On what authority does the US government have to determine ownership, rights, or even to resolve disputes of celestial bodies? The Outer Space Treaty isn't sufficient to grant recognizable authority to the US government. So I fail to see how any of this is legal or in line with other international behavior. (probably illegal [iflscience.com])
I hope the International community comes down hard on our stupidity. As a cit
Re:Can I mine the White House lawn (Score:5, Insightful)
Can I mine the White House lawn? It's not my property,
Not relevant. What's relevant is that it is someone else's property. By treaty, the moon is no one's.
On what authority does the US government have to determine ownership, rights, or even to resolve disputes of celestial bodies?
Again, irrelevant. What's relevant is that the US government can, and does, govern US companies and individuals.
I hope the International community comes down hard on our stupidity. As a citizen of the US I can't really do anything about it without being labeled a communist
And not without reason, though I'd be inclined to go with "clueless idiot."
Which I guess is the same thing.
MOD PARENT UP! (Score:2)
Wish I had mod points today....
Re: (Score:2)
By treaty, the moon is no one's.
the Treaty doesn't prevent private citizens claiming land; in fact the Lunar Embassy did so, remember?
They were selling off the moon for 25 an acre with mineral rights. So a mining company could face lawsuits if they encroach on those plots
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
How would this be any different from fishing in international waters (which plenty of nations do)?
Re: Can I mine the White House lawn (Score:2)
We have treaties and centuries of practice that governs international waters. We even defines what international waters are and what you can do there. If you want to drill for gas and oil for example, there is a whole process to that. That doesn't exist for the Moon yet, and likely won't be allowed once countries start working out the question.
Re: (Score:2)
That doesn't exist for the Moon yet, and likely won't be allowed once countries start working out the question.
Well first we have to work out which countries even get to have a say in that. Just because some non-space-capable countries who Can't get out of earth's orbit might be theoretically interested, doesn't mean they get a say.
Something makes international waters different is history, and that Every country physically has access to them or the potential to have access to them and need for them.
So the
Re: Can I mine the White House lawn (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well first we have to work out which countries even get to have a say in that. Just because some non-space-capable countries who Can't get out of earth's orbit might be theoretically interested, doesn't mean they get a say.
Any country that can see the Moon should get a say in what happens to it.
But as for International Airspace; Outside Earth's orbit, there is very Little need for any countries to co-operate, Except for the specific countries who actually have the Ability to travel outside that orbit.
Avoiding disputes and wars in spaces trying to defend those disputes seems like a good reason for international cooperation to me.
The problem with a space war is that conflicts, even over the Moon, would likely occur in important orbitals that used for staging space travel and satellites. There is only a very limited area where equipment can operate in Earth's orbit without being fried with radiation, so if we want don't want to delay
Re: (Score:1)
You are bad in counting.
The EU is not a country. Basically every ESA member can go where ever it wants: alone.
Then there are: USA, Russia, China, Japan, India. And I'm sure I forgot one or two, too.
Re: (Score:2)
Nullum crimen sine lege, ever heard about that? Or is it just yet another basis of civilization, law etc. that leftists have decided to toss because it doesn't suit them?
Rather there being no law at all. We're operating under a set of treaties that don't define things very well. Such as the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
And if you think the US is on board letting this play out like some kind of Wild West fantasy, think again, the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 is already the law for US companies. You'll have to move to Somolia and shout "Nullum lege!" from on top of your rocket. That will surely make your immune to the UN.
mano a manosplaining (Score:2)
OK, let me explain to you, because as a leftist you obviously have no clue how laws work. "Sine lege" dpoesn't mean there being no law system at all, it says "what isn't explicitly prohibited by the law (sine lege) is allowed (nullum crimen)". So basically you're butthurt over... a nonexistent law being violated? Or the existence of some piece of the universe that leftist totalitarians haven't managed to regulate to hell yet?
Thanks for confirming what I already knew. My community college professor would probably be impressed that I paid attention at all in class, let alone retained it for decades.
"Sine lege" means without law (and should be familiar to people who know a little Spanish or Italian). And it's not very good Latin, but an example I used as a hypothetical battlecry in my rhetorical example. (should I explain rhetoric? I don't think I will, seems tedious if we have to go that far into the basics)
We could go back and f
Re: (Score:2)
Of course all of those treaties were signed in a world where fishing in what are international waters had been happening for the entire history of humans ocean fishing from boats without treaties.
Meanwhile we're not even remotely close to either having the ability to effectively mine on the moon or even having the technology (fusion power) that would create the need to do so and you're throwing a fit because we don't have treaties yet. It all seems like nonsense drama to me as there isn't even a need for tr
Re:Can I mine the White House lawn (Score:5, Funny)
On what authority does the US government have to determine ownership, rights, or even to resolve disputes of celestial bodies?
The moon belongs to America, and anxiously awaits the arrival of our astromen.
Will you be among them?
Re: (Score:2)
Can I mine the White House lawn?
Probably depends on who's President. I'm guessing there's, at least, one wannabe one who'd be open to some sort of arrangement, especially if he got paid and could put his name on it, in gold ... :-)
Quite Restrained compared to Last Time (Score:3)
On what authority does the US government have to determine ownership, rights, or even to resolve disputes of celestial bodies?
Technically it is not doing that. All it is saying is that if you do mine resources from the moon then, once you get them back to Earth, if you are in the US then they belong to you. In many ways this is far more restrained than the last time we had to deal with large amounts of unexplored and unknown territory. Back then the Pope was happy to assign half the world to Spain and the other half to Portugal in the Treaty of Tordesillas [wikipedia.org] which the eventual huge colonial holdings of the UK, France etc. shows how
Re: (Score:2)
On what authority does the US government have to determine ownership, rights, or even to resolve disputes of celestial bodies?
Almost none; they have only the right to rule on disputes between US citizens.
When it comes to other nations the US has only the property rights that other powers will recognize - which is none.
Or which the US can back up by force; which is forbidden in space by treaty...
The US does have the physical capability to plant their flag in foreign soil - just like the French, Spanish, an
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Seems pretty silly to be worrying about mineral rights on the moon when it will likely never be profitable to mine it. I seem to recall reading once that even if there were gold bars lying on the surface of the moon it still wouldn't be profitable to retrieve them.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't want to. It has Compro, a lead-tainted human manure in it.
How about an abundant and free fuel from earth? (Score:1)
All we need is a relatively simple reactor that can be fueled by thorium, which is concentrated in existing mining waste, also containing rare earths which are untouched because of idiotic thorium policy. Without any mining, we could have an abundant supply of rare earths and energy, well in excess of US demand. Without any uranium mining or enrichment, we could recover the uranium and transuranics within spent nuclear fuel, for the one-time startup fissile needed by those reactors. Imagine that, an option
"For All Mankind" (Score:2)
Sorta tackled this in seasons 3 and 4 where a company developed Helium-3 fusion energy via mining on the Moon and it becomes a hot button political issue as all the out of work oil and gas miners are out work.
Sure (Score:2)
We'll get Sam Bell up there right away to oversee the operation.
Minimum requirements (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Get semi-autonomous surface mining equipment that can operate in permanently shadowed craters on the Moon (where the best mining sites are, I assume sites oriented to collect solar wind without direct solar exposure blowing it all past... but I'm no expert on the subject).
2) Refine it (you aren't shipping bulk regolith back, you're going to want to get as close to pure product as you can).
3) Package it for shipment.
4) Deliver a constant supply of material-return rockets to your mining site.
5) Load your packaged product in a return vessel. (All semi-autonomously, of course. But with a 2.6 ls signal round trip, you can still have humans do a fair amount of 'live' problem resolution, it ain't Mars)
6) Get that ship successfully to Earth in a convenient pickup location.
7) Deliver the product to your customer.
8) Do all of the above for somewhere at or below $1500/L to maintain profit margins. (That's 59g of material, so essentially all your mass will be in the containment vessel required to keep it liquid for the entire return trip)
At the very least it's a very long term investment. I'd recommend going the extra mile and installing a LEML (a magnetic catapult). With a LEML, you don't need to deliver a complete, fuelled return rocket for every HE3 package. Believe it or not, there's also a theoretical way to process lunar regolith into solar cells. If you're already building an entire robotic mining operation in the shade of a crater... why not set aside some territory on the sunlit side and put some solar cell robots to work building a massive solar farm to power everything?
Once you have the solar farm, you also have a great base for a manned research station - after all, you've built powered infrastructure and a landing pad, all tended by robots, around the edge of a crater providing almost permanent shadow and weeks of sunshine at a time. Choose a polar region and you can have eternal darkness AND eternal sunshine within a few meters of each other. Then you can add a nice lunar telescope if you wish. Maybe find a nice lava tube for people to get shielding from solar radiation, or throw up the electrostatic shields NASA's had designed for protecting astronauts on Mars missions.
And just for fun - if you built that LEML, now you have something to lob rocks with. This assumes you got really excited reading "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and didn't realize we can't build a self-sufficient lunar colony, and whoever you lob rocks at will just nuke your terrestrial home so you have nowhere to get resupplied from.
Re: (Score:2)
4) Deliver a constant supply of material-return rockets to your mining site.
Why? Your payload will be measured in kilograms, and there's no issue if you can deliver it just once a year. It will probably make sense to split the payload into several rockets to minimize the potential loss, but we're talking about maybe 2 rockets a year instead of 1. Keeping it liquid is also not a big deal, you'll have plenty more of He-4 that you can liquify and let it slowly boil off.
Re: (Score:2)
The interval and gross quantity isn't the issue, it's the fact that you do in fact have to keep sending them. Unlike everything else that's an upfront cost (with some maintenance), the delivery charge is full cost, every time. You can't save money on it, if you want to get the product back to Earth you need to deliver a return-capable vessel to the Moon every time.
India recently spent over $70m just to get a small lander to the Moon. That's a fraction of the mass and complexity we're discussing.
Re: (Score:1)
Helium is a bitch to liquify.
With hard vacuum around, it might be easier on the moon though.
Re: (Score:2)
Hard vacuum actually makes it worse - higher pressure, higher boiling point. Though for liquid He it is already within a few degrees of absolute zero even at standard pressure.
What the Moon does have, though, is shaded areas where the surface temperatures are around 20K. For comparison, the freezing point of water at standard pressure is around 273K, and 0K is 'absolute zero'. So you start with a major bonus if you do your processing and containment in one of those conveniently cold spots.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you. I do strive for accuracy so the correction is appreciated.
Helium ? (Score:2)
The US does not own the moon (Score:2)
So good luck with that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think
That is the relevant part of your statement. How dumb can you be?
Don't sell the moon (Score:2)
Nationalism and imperialism on the moon: What could go wrong?
Other individuals already claim to own the moon and have sold leases to others: If the US starts claiming rights, they will face lawsuits from those people. (The USA invaded the moon in 1969, no other country/person has done that.)
It will be interesting to see if member countries of the 1967 treaty will punish the USA for obvious violation of international law. This isn't weasel-words like "national security" that are used to mean whatever
Is there a He3 fusion reactor? (Score:2)
So He3 mining seems dubious in terms of supply and demand.
Science Fiction Is Fiction (Score:2)
Three points to show this company is just an elaborate scam.
1) Helium-3 isn't common on the Moon. It's more common there than on Earth, but there's still not actually a lot of it.
2) Helium-3 on the Moon isn't concentrated. There are no veins of it or areas of greater concentration. Which means you have to do massive strip mining to get enough of the stuff to be worthwhile. The concentration of He-3 is 3) Helium-3 isn't useful for any industrial process. It's useful scientifically, but for the amounts need