“We’re Going to Dig the Moon Dry”: U.S. Startup Unveils Lunar Excavator to Harvest Helium-3 and Dominate Space Energy – The unveiling of a groundbreaking lunar excavator prototype by NASA-backed startup Interlune, in collaboration with industrial giant Vermeer, marks a significant leap forward …
12 Comments
From the article
The race to harness lunar resources is reaching a new milestone with the unveiling of a groundbreaking lunar excavator prototype. Developed by Interlune, a startup backed by NASA and the US Department of Energy, in partnership with Iowa-based industrial equipment manufacturer Vermeer, this innovative machine is designed to extract valuable resources like helium-3 from the moon’s surface. Helium-3, a rare isotope on Earth, holds the potential to revolutionize the technology and energy sectors. As Earth’s reserves dwindle, the importance of lunar mining grows, promising not just technological advancement but possibly a shift in global energy dynamics.
Also from the article
Interlune, with Vermeer, is rapidly advancing towards a lunar mission targeted for 2030. Despite Komatsu’s early lead, the Vermeer-Interlune collaboration has made significant strides, producing a larger, full-scale prototype with greater excavation capacity. Gary Lai, Interlune’s co-founder and CTO, underscores the unprecedented nature of high-rate helium-3 excavation. The prototype has shown promising results in tests, and both companies are eager to enter the next development phase.
So where does one sign up to be cloned into a huge clone workforce that never gets to return to earth?
All joking aside these are some big players, not just small investment scam startups, interesting to see
Getting He-3 would be cool I guess. But maybe we should have working fusion power first, so we can actually use it for anything…
sick, what about we stop destroying living nature,, oh but to save us there is no profit
But as the movie Iron Sky taught us, it’s already being mined by Nazis. And not just Elon.
If that AI picture is the only thing we can see of the prototype, I wouldn’t have high hopes.
That attitude hasn’t fucked anything up before, let’s go!
apparently therr are rumours that china js already doing that on the moon in areas you can’t see but who knows.
And nobody’s going to go so crazy it breaks up and stops being able to regulate tides or a proper orbit and the remaining pieces fall to earth right?
Right?
Is anybody on earth still working on Helium-3 based fusion? I thought that approach was abandoned decades ago due to the lack of a consistent supply of Helium-3?
What happened to all the money we gave to elon musk
Lunar regolith has up to 20ppb He3 in a fairly thin layer (probably under a metre thick).
So 1kg of regolith has 20µg of He3
He3 fusion is about 17MeV/atom. Or 550kJ/µg
1kg of regolith has 10MJ
1kg of coal has ~20MJ/kg
Running a steam engine on strip mined coal from an open cut mine 100 metres away is not economically competitive with wind and solar.
Why on earth (or in this case off it) would you think you could compete by building your strip mine on the moon and processing twice as much material in a much more complicated process?