Interlune's Prospect Moon is the first payload built to answer the helium-3 question. It still needs a ride
Three scoops, two extraction methods and a mass spectrometer. Ready in September 2027, seeking a 2028 launch, with customer deliveries due around the same time.
Interlune published a walkthrough of its Prospect Moon payload on Oct. 13, and it is the most concrete description yet of how a commercial company plans to measure a lunar resource in place. A robotic arm takes three scoops of regolith. The first is heated to 950 °C and the released gases go to a mass spectrometer. Scoop two is milled mechanically and measured the same way. A third tests a grain-size sorter. A multispectral camera checks titanium levels and soil age on every scoop.
The interesting experiment is the comparison between scoops one and two. Interlune says its mechanical method uses about a tenth the power of heating. If milling releases enough of the gas, a harvester could be much smaller and cheaper to power than the furnace-on-wheels designs of earlier studies. If it doesn’t, the business model gets heavier fast.
The titanium measurement is quietly clever. Interlune says it will combine those readings with other datasets to predict solar-wind gas concentrations, including helium-3, more widely. One landing site becomes a calibration point for an orbital map. That’s how prospecting works on Earth too: drill a few holes, then trust the geophysics between them.
The payload is backed by a $6.9 million NASA contract. It will be ready for integration on a lander in September 2027, and Interlune is “actively seeking a ride for a 2028 launch.” No lander is named.
Now set that beside the customer book. The DOE Isotope Program’s three liters are due no later than April 2029. Bluefors’ up-to-10,000-liter-a-year deal starts in 2028. The mission that first measures how much helium-3 is in the ground and the window for delivering it overlap almost exactly.
We think Prospect Moon is the right mission and the timeline around it is aspirational. The real deliverable is the concentration number. A good one makes Interlune financeable for a harvester. A poor one makes the contracts renegotiable.
Date to watch: an announced lander contract for Prospect Moon. Without a ride, 2028 is a placeholder.
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