Interlune, a natural resources company, has officially secured a grant through NASA’s TechFlights solicitation so to advance its proprietary technology for the overarching purpose of enhancing lunar soil, or regolith. Under the established framework, Interlune will leverage a beneficiation process, where it is going to take raw materials (in this case, lunar regolith) and improve its chemical and physical properties in preparation for extracting valuable resources from the same. This regolith beneficiation process is strategically important in the context oif using it across rocket propulsion, construction, life support, and other activities that support a long-term presence on the Moon. Anyway, to understand the significance of such a development, we must take into account how, as of today, the state-of-the-art technology for extracting valuable resources from lunar regolith still requires excessive amounts of energy, a scarce resource on the Moon. This has led to NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) outlining a need for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) in construction, advanced manufacturing, and production of fluids and gases for propellant and life support. Enter Interlune’s solution. Basically, Interlune banks upon its core intellectual property, which happens to include novel technologies for the excavation, beneficiation, and other processing of industrial regolith quantities to extract valuable resources. Not just that, the company’s harvester is also significantly smaller, lighter, and requires less power than any other industry concepts. This detail alone, like you can guess, makes it less expensive to transport to and operate on the Moon
But where exactly Interlune will use its newly-secured grant? Well, the answer to that is provided by the company’s plan of testing its beneficiation technology in a simulated lunar environment, including regolith simulants in a vacuum and lunar environment. The idea driving these tests would be to analyze tradeoffs in size, weight, and power required for different levels of performance using parabolic flights. Once all the analysis is completed, Interlune will use the results to scale its technology accordingly and make it handle multiple tons of regolith.
Another objective that Interlune will try and achieve here is becoming the first company ever to commercialize natural resources from space, starting with Helium-3 from the Moon. It will sell the component to commercial and government customers in quantum computing, national security, medical imaging, and fusion energy markets.
“We are writing a new playbook for how public-private partnerships can deliver world-changing innovation to benefit all,” said Rob Meyerson, co-founder and CEO of Interlune. “This award is one more step toward our goal of rebuilding the entire U.S. industrial base for lunar exploration.”
The grant delivers a rather interesting follow-up to all the progress Interlune has made in recent times. You see, in March of this year, the company had announced $18 million in seed funding, with the round led by Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm Seven Seven Six. Beyond that, back in 2023, the company had also received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award for operationalizing technology to size and sort lunar regolith.
