NASA Is Paying to Mine the Moon. Nobody Has Figured Out Who Owns What It Pulls Out.
NASA just paid a company to extract helium-3 from the Moon before anyone has settled who owns it.
Interlune won a $6.9 million NASA SBIR Phase 3 contract on May 4 to fly Prospect Moon, a robotic payload that will scoop lunar dirt, heat it, and pull out the volatiles trapped inside — including helium-3, an isotope used in quantum computing cooling systems and potentially fusion reactors. The company has roughly $500 million in contracts from the Department of Energy and quantum computing firms Maybell Quantum and Bluefors, with some customers requiring delivery to begin by 2028. The DOE agreed last year to purchase three liters of helium-3 from the Moon by April 2029 — the first-ever US government purchase of a resource that does not yet exist.
Helium-3 is embedded in lunar regolith by solar wind at concentrations far higher than Earth-bound sources. On Earth, the isotope is a byproduct of nuclear weapons maintenance and tritium production — a finite supply that constrains the growth of quantum computing hardware. Dilution refrigerators, the cryogenic systems that cool quantum processors to near absolute zero, require helium-3 to reach operating temperatures. As quantum companies scale toward fault-tolerant machines, the supply bottleneck becomes an explicit engineering constraint.
The extraction physics is not in doubt. The legal basis for owning what comes back is.
No international treaty grants any company exclusive rights to a lunar mining site. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits national appropriation of the Moon and celestial bodies, and scholars consider the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act — which authorizes US companies to harvest and sell extracted space resources — potentially in tension with that prohibition. The UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is expected to publish recommended principles on space resource governance by 2027, but those principles will be recommendations, not binding international law. In the meantime, a Chinese or Russian competitor could extract helium-3 from the same lunar deposit a US company has spent years developing, and there is no explicit legal recourse. There is no treaty mechanism to stop them, no arbitration body to appeal to, and no enforcement pathway that does not involve either diplomatic confrontation or something worse.
The ambiguity is not merely theoretical. Both China and Russia have active lunar programs with extraction capability on their development roadmaps. Interlune's customers — the DOE, Maybell Quantum, Bluefors — are signing contracts that presuppose a future where extraction is legally uncontested. If a competitor extracts from the same deposit, those contracts face legal challenge. The skeptics are not wrong that the timeline is long; they are wrong that the legal problem can wait. The commitments being made now are real. The question of who owns what is being decided, slowly and without fanfare, in the gap between what companies are willing to sign and what international law is prepared to enforce.
The leadership at Interlune has thought about this longer than almost anyone. Co-founder and CEO Rob Meyerson previously ran Blue Origin. Co-founder and CTO Gary Lai was Blue Origin's chief architect. Executive chairman Harrison H. Schmitt commanded the lunar module on Apollo 17 and holds a geologist's eye for the problem. The company has raised $18 million in seed funding and built a full-scale excavator prototype, shown to prospective customers whose dilution refrigerators require helium-3 to reach operating temperatures.
Prospect Moon is scheduled for launch in 2028, with integration onto a lunar lander planned for fall 2027. It is a demonstration, not a production run — designed to prove the extraction physics at payload scale. Commercial operation, if it comes, is early 2030s. That timeline requires engineering, regulation, and international diplomacy to all move in the same direction simultaneously. The contracts suggest some buyers find that outcome worth betting on. If Prospect Moon works and the legal framework clarifies in favor of US companies, helium-3 becomes the first non-terrestrial resource in a functioning commercial supply chain. If it fails — or if the legal ambiguity never resolves — the $500 million in signed contracts and the DOE purchase agreement have no fallback. The Moon has not yet weighed in.
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