Seattle-based Interlune is expanding its partnership with Vermeer, an Iowa-based industrial equipment manufacturer, to develop construction tools for use on the moon.
The two companies forged their initial strategic partnership to further Interlune’s plans to extract helium-3 from tons of moon dirt and rocks, also known as regolith. Their full-scale prototype of a lunar excavator was unveiled a little more than a year ago.
At the time, Interlune was focused on mining helium-3 and bringing it back to Earth for applications ranging from quantum computing to medical imaging and nuclear fusion. But a major shift came in March when NASA announced a 10-year, $30 billion initiative to build the infrastructure for a moon base.
Interlune co-founder and CEO Rob Meyerson said he and his teammates realized that the partnership with Vermeer could support NASA’s plans. “We went back to Vermeer … and we decided that it made sense to formally expand the partnership to focus on all these other things that we’ve had in mind,” Meyerson told GeekWire.
For example, a lunar construction project is likely to involve building roads, compacting surfaces, digging trenches for underground utilities and moving rocks to clear space for a habitat. Heavy equipment might be needed to build protective berms around nuclear reactors.
Vermeer’s president and CEO, Jason Andringa, said he’s up for the challenge. He noted that before taking charge of the business his grandfather founded nearly 80 years ago, he was a staff engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“When I left NASA and came to work for Vermeer, my hope always was to be able to re-merge my passion for aerospace, specifically for the human exploration and human colonization of the moon and Mars, with my coming back to my family business … and use what I knew Vermeer was best at on Earth to do important work on the moon and Mars,” he told GeekWire.
Interlune is already working with the Colorado School of Mines on the design of an implement that could be used to dig trenches or excavate lunar soil, under the terms of a $150,000 NASA contract that was awarded earlier this year. Meyerson said the Vermeer partnership will take such projects to the next level.
“We want to really formalize the partnership so that we can start to think beyond prototypes, and think about sustainable operations, systems that are resilient to the environment,” he said. “That is what Interlune and Vermeer bring together as a team.”
Interlune will work with Vermeer to build a demonstration tool that could be put on a lunar vehicle and sent to the moon in 2028 or 2029. “It is going to be something around leveling, rock removal and compaction,” Meyerson said. “That will be the priority for the first one.”
That timeline aligns with NASA’s plans to send Lunar Terrain Vehicles, or LTVs, to the moon for the Artemis 5 mission, which is currently set for launch in late 2028.
Andringa said Vermeer would follow Interlune’s lead on the requirements for a lunar site preparation tool. “It would most likely involve what we call surface mining, which is a big drum attachment on a machine that basically mills out a level of the very top part of the regolith, and then it could be compacted,” he said. “Depending on the exact location on the moon and the exact properties of the material, you might just need to go over it with the drum one time.”
Over the longer term, Interlune and Vermeer would add to the toolkit. “Sometime in the future, you may have a specific-purpose machine that the two companies put together, that is specially designed just for that industrial operation, rather than the missions that NASA has in mind for the LTV,” Meyerson said.
In the meantime, Interlune is continuing work on its helium-3 mining initiative. The company’s first space mission, known as Crescent Moon, involves sending a multispectral camera to the lunar surface later this year. The camera is designed to estimate how much helium-3 is present in the soil around the landing site.
Interlune’s second mission, Prospect Moon, recently received $6.9 million in NASA funding for design and development. That mission is currently due for launch in 2028 and will test methods for extracting helium-3 and hydrogen from lunar regolith.
“We have the team in place, and things are going well,” Meyerson said. “We’re ticking through all of our milestones with the NASA team.”
Meanwhile, Vermeer is pursuing a separate partnership with Texas-based Astroport Space Technologies, which is developing its own suite of robotic systems for lunar construction projects. “Interlune and Astroport are aware of each other, and both of them feel as though there’s going to be plenty of work to go around,” Andringa said.
Andringa emphasized that the work on lunar construction equipment makes up just a small percentage of what Vermeer does. About 10 of Vermeer’s 4,500 employees are working on moon projects, and even those employees have other projects in their portfolio, he said.
Nevertheless, Andringa acknowledged that there’s something inspirational about extending the company’s reach beyond Earth. “It’s always going to be a small part of Vermeer, but it’s going to be a super-engaging, motivating, fun, stimulating, challenging part of Vermeer,” he said. “And you know what? What we learn to build stuff and fly stuff and operate stuff on the moon is just going to make us even better at the job sites where Vermeer machines work on Earth. That’s the reason we’re doing it.”
Read the full article here
