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Company claims ownership of Moon's resources, sells helium for quantum computing refrigeration [1]

['Mark Frauenfelder']

Date: 2025-09-17

The Man Who Sold the Moon is a 1950 novella by Robert A. Heinlein. It's about a businessman, Delos D. Harriman, who is determined to be the first to travel to and control the resources of the Moon.

Seventy-five years later, a man really has sold the Moon, or at least part of it. His name is Rob Meyerson.

Meyerson, CEO of the space mining startup Interlune, sold $300 million of helium-3 to Bluefors, which makes ultra-cold fridges for quantum computers.

Helium-3 is exceedingly valuable. From The Washington Post:

This isn't balloon helium. Helium-3 is lighter than the Helium-4 gas featured at birthday parties. It's also much rarer on Earth. But moon rock samples from the Apollo days hint at its abundance there. Interlune has placed the market value at $20 million per kilogram (about 7,500 liters). "It's the only resource in the universe that's priced high enough to warrant going out to space today and bringing it back to Earth," says Meyerson. His company plans to dig up moon dirt, extract the helium-3, and ship it back to Earth starting in 2028.

But here's the catch: no one's quite sure who owns the Moon's natural resources. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty says no country can claim the Moon. But in 2015, the U.S. passed a law allowing American companies to mine and sell space resources. This creates a messy situation where U.S. firms might have a green light, but the rest of the world doesn't agree.

The Bluefors-Interlune deal is a signal that lunar mining is no longer science fiction — it will become big business. The question is: who gets to write the rules?

Previously:

• Heinlein memoir: LEARNING CURVE – the secret history of science fiction

• Saturn's Children: Stross's robopervy tribute to the late late Heinlein

• How Heinlein plotted

• The novel Heinlein would have written about GW Bush's America

• Roddenberry's Star Trek was 'above all, a critique of Robert Heinlein'

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