A stealth startup led by ex-Blue Origin leaders, centered on harvesting assets from the moon, has quietly closed a large new tranche of funding, in accordance with regulatory documents.
Interlune, a startup that’s been round for at the very least three years however has made nearly zero public bulletins about its tech, has raised $15.5 million in new funding and goals to shut one other $2 million. A consultant for Interlune declined to touch upon this story.
That is the primary public indication that the corporate has closed any funding since a $1.85 million seed spherical in 2022.
A lot of what’s recognized concerning the startup was reported by GeekWire last October, when Interlune CTO Gary Lai briefly described the startup throughout a speech at Seattle’s Museum of Flight: “We aim to be the first company that harvests natural resources from the moon to use here on Earth,” he reportedly mentioned. “We’re building a completely novel approach to extract those resources, efficiently, cost-effectively and also responsibly. The goal is really to create a sustainable in-space economy.”
Lai is an aerospace engineer whose resume features a 20-year stint at Blue Origin, the place he finally grew to become chief architect for area transportation methods, together with launchers and lunar landers. Interlune is being led by Rob Meyerson, an aerospace government who was president at Blue Origin for fifteen years. Meyerson can be a prolific angel investor, with investments in well-known {hardware} startups together with Axiom House, Starfish House, Hermeus, and Hadrian Automation.
The submitting with the U.S. Securities and Change Fee additionally lists legal professional H. Indra Hornsby as an organization government. Hornsby beforehand held the place of Normal Counsel at BlackSky and Spaceflight Industries, and in addition labored as an government VP at Rocket Lab.
What little else is understood of Interlune’s tech comes from an summary of a small SBIR the startup was awarded final 12 months from the Nationwide Science Basis. Beneath that award, the corporate mentioned it is going to intention to “develop a core enabling technology for lunar in situ resource utilization: the ability to sort ‘moon dirt’ (lunar regolith) by particle size.”
“By enabling raw lunar regolith to be sorted into multiple streams by particle size, the technology will provide appropriate feedstocks for lunar oxygen extraction systems, lunar 3-dimensional printers, and other applications,” the abstract says.
A rising variety of area startups are specializing in what’s often known as in-situ useful resource utilization (ISRU), or gathering and remodeling area assets into priceless commodities. A lot of that is pushed by NASA’s said precedence to construct a long-term human outpost on the moon through its Artemis program: the company acknowledges that longer-term stays in area would require the power to generate supplies domestically – whether or not that’s to construct roads, produce breathable air, and even make rocket propellants.
However it isn’t simply startups which might be attempting to commercialize ISRU tech; final 12 months, Blue Origin introduced that it had made photo voltaic cells and transmission wires out of a cloth that’s chemically an identical to lunar regolith.
In its February 2023 announcement on the tech, Blue Origin mentioned, “Learning to live off the land – on the Moon and on Mars – will require extensive collaboration across the ISRU community.” The phrase is echoed in Interlune’s summary: “The use of the Moon’s resources is a disruptive capability that will enable missions there to ‘live off the land,’ making the development of this technology important for government agencies and industry alike.”
