Interlune Advances NASA-Backed Lunar Excavation Platform

New updates have been reported about Interlune.

Interlune is using a $150,000 NASA STTR Phase I grant to refine a lunar trenching platform central to its helium‑3 commercialization strategy and to Artemis Base Camp site preparation. Partnering with Colorado School of Mines, the company aims to cut tractive force, power draw, and dust relative to legacy digging systems through physics-based modeling, prototype validation in simulated regolith, and a scalability study that feeds directly into a concept-of-operations roadmap for commercial and government deployments.
Interlune’s harvesting architecture—excavate, sort, extract, separate—relies on proprietary hardware, and the current work tackles the first and most energy-intensive phase, a prerequisite to processing industrial metals, rare earths, and rocket propellant precursors. CEO Rob Meyerson underscored that mastery of large-scale regolith excavation underpins planned helium-3 deliveries under more than $500 million in existing purchase orders and government contracts. The NASA-funded effort complements last year’s Vermeer partnership on excavation machinery, the unveiling of a full-scale prototype, and development of bespoke regolith simulants at a new Houston R&D center. With $18 million raised to date, Interlune is positioning this technology as a dual-use asset: enabling lunar resource extraction for private demand such as quantum computing applications of helium-3 while simultaneously meeting NASA’s timelines for Artemis infrastructure.