The US and China are competing to return to the moon. Both superpowers hope to reach the lunar surface by 2028 and 2030 respectively, and the rivalry could have far-reaching geopolitical implications.
And it’s not just a matter of improving our scientific understanding of our nearest space neighbor — companies are pushing to extract highly valuable resources from the moon, as Mustafa Bilal, a research assistant at the Islamabad-based Center for Aerospace and Security Studies, wrote. SpaceNews.
For example, Helsinki-based cryogenic equipment company Bluefors signed a deal with space commercialization startup Interlune last month, agreeing to buy up to ten thousand liters of lunar helium-3, which it says could be worth $300 million.
Helium-3, a stable isotope of helium, is a resource in high demand because it could power nuclear reactors on the moon or at home, or help cool quantum computers. This is especially rare on Earth, but more common on the Moon because solar winds bombard its unprotected surface with particles, making it a motivating factor for private industry to reach the lunar surface.
Interlune has a tough task ahead of it to prove that harvesting helium-3 on the Moon is economically feasible. First, the company’s excavators can chew through millions of tons of regolith to collect enough of the isotope. Forbes reported last month, because it’s not exactly plentiful. Getting the necessary equipment to the moon can prove astronomically expensive, making it a high-risk bet.
Interlune is far from alone. There is an entire ecosystem of companies planning to mine the Moon’s resources. For example, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin signed a deal late last month to map resources including helium-3 and water ice from orbit, “evaluate them on the ground and use them locally.”
“Besides helium-3, water ice on the Moon is an important resource because it can be processed into drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel,” Bilal wrote. “Therefore, despite incredible odds due to technical difficulties, a combination of private and public interests is pushing ahead with the commercialization of lunar mining.”
Resources such as helium-3 could allow nations to permanently establish themselves on Earth’s natural satellite, which experts say could determine the winner of the ongoing space race. First, lunar bases will not be able to rely entirely on solar panels because night lasts two Earth weeks, making nuclear power more profitable there.
“For this reason, the first nation with a nuclear power source on the Moon could actually establish a de facto, if not de jure, ‘containment zone’ for safety reasons, thus setting a precedent for the legal environment for lunar operations in which later entrants would operate,” Bilal wrote.
While companies are already signing deals to extract and sell potentially valuable resources on the Moon, many questions remain. First, creating an economy in lunar orbit, as NASA envisioned, is clearly years away—if it’s ever practical—and companies like SpaceX are just beginning to develop reusable transportation methods that could reliably bridge the gap between worlds.
And we don’t even know exactly how much helium-3 is on the Moon, let alone how to actually use it as a reliable energy source in the form of fusion reactors, a concept that has remained very elusive despite decades of research.
Still, Interlune hopes to send a multispectral camera to the lunar surface next year as part of Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander to measure the concentration of helium-3 in the regolith in hopes of accelerating the lunar gold rush.
More on lunar resources: Scientists say more than a trillion dollars worth of platinum is expected from lunar craters