In 2015, Congress passed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which allows domestic space corporations the rights to keep and sell whatever resources they acquire in space. Now, an American company is seeking to do just that. Interlune, a company founded by an Apollo astronaut and a pair of former executives from Blue Origin — a company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos — says it is developing technology to harvest and bring back material from the moon. The move would be a blow to China, who has been a top U.S. competitor in a race to be first to tap the moon’s mineral stores. Rob Meyerson, the former president of Blue Origin and the co-founder of Interlune, says the company intends to be the first to test the 2015 space law by collecting, returning, and selling lunar resources. Specifically, the company will be seeking to acquire Helium-3, which has a large demand in quantum computing, as systems must operate in extremely cold temperatures, as explained by The Washington Post, who first reported the story. Interlune already has a “customer that wants to buy lunar resources in large quantities. We intend to be the first to go commercialize and deliver and support those customers,” Meyerson told the Post. NASA, which said in 2020 it was looking for companies to harvest rocks and dirt for the lunar surface and sell them to the space agency, could be a customer as well. Meyerson told the Post that Interlune has pioneered an extraction technology that is small, light and does not require a lot of power, making it easy to transport and operate on the lunar surface. He also stated that as more companies begin flying to the moon, deliveries to and from the moon will become more common. “We’re just starting this operational cadence, and we’re really building the whole industrial base around going to the moon,” Meyerson said.Space mining, which has long been the subject of science fiction, may soon become a reality.
