Lovell City Moon base as imagined in the TV Series The Expanse. Credit: The Expanse

The Moon is drawing new attention—not for space exploration, but for resource extraction.

A rare isotope called helium-3, embedded in its surface dust, has become a focus for governments, tech companies, and startups. It’s prized for its potential to cool quantum computers, power next-generation medical devices, and even serve as fuel for a cleaner kind of nuclear energy.

While helium-3 is exceedingly rare on Earth, it’s plentiful on the Moon. But getting it won’t be simple. The race to harvest helium-3 is shaping up to be a test of global priorities: who builds the tools, who sets the rules, and who benefits from resources found off Earth.

The Coming Lunar Gold Rush

Artist’s impression of lunar mining operations for extracting helium-3. Credit: Interlune

Helium-3 is a light, non-radioactive isotope embedded in the Moon’s regolith (lunar soil). It has built up over billions of years, carried by the solar wind and deposited onto the lunar surface due to its lack of a protective magnetic field. Scientists have long speculated what could be done with it. In theory, helium-3 could power a new generation of clean fusion reactors, free from the dangerous radioactive waste that plagues current nuclear fission technology. “It is not radioactive and would not produce dangerous waste products,” the European Space Agency notes.

The idea is older than it seems. Apollo geologist Harrison Schmidt argued decades ago that mining lunar helium-3 could change the world. Gerald Kulcinski at the University of Wisconsin–Madison even built a small reactor to explore helium-3 fusion. But despite years of effort, no one has yet achieved a fusion reaction with a net energy gain for longer than a few minutes.

Helium-3 is used in ultra-low-temperature refrigerators for quantum computers, enhances certain types of lung MRI scans when hyperpolarized, and is a key component in neutron detectors used for nuclear security. “It’s like 200 times colder inside a Blue Origin fridge than outer space,” one cryogenics engineer told Interesting Engineering.

Earth, however, offers only crumbs of the valuable isotope. Most of our helium-3 here comes from the slow decay of tritium in nuclear stockpiles, producing just a few thousand liters each year. Scientists estimate the Moon holds up to a million metric tons of it, scattered across the top layer of lunar soil. To get even a few liters, miners may have to process enough dust to fill a backyard swimming pool.

The Moon Is Open for Business

The U.S. and China are beginning to treat the Moon as a practical extension of their national interests. Russia, Europe, and India are just behind. Instead of one-off landings, the goal now is to build systems that can support long-term operations. Whoever achieves that first could decide how the world uses lunar resources in the near future.

In September 2025, the Helsinki-based cryogenics firm Bluefors signed an agreement with startup Interlune to purchase up to 1,000 liters of lunar helium-3 annually, in a deal worth about $300 million. Two weeks later, Blue Origin announced Project Oasis, a multi-phase mission that will begin by mapping lunar resources such as water ice and helium-3 from orbit.

Interlune’s plan sounds deceptively simple: scoop up regolith, heat it to release trapped gases, separate the rare helium-3, and ship it home. But lunar soil is sharp, glassy, and sticky; it clogs joints and scours machinery. In the Moon’s vacuum, lubricants evaporate, and even autonomous robots must work around the seconds-long delay between Earth and their controllers.

Still, governments are investing despite the technical challenges. In mid-2025, the U.S. Department of Energy made a historic procurement of three liters of lunar helium-3, marking the first government purchase of an extraterrestrial resource. Washington wants to seed a supply chain that may one day stretch 384,000 kilometers through space.

Politics

Earth, Moon, and Lunar Module Eagle in lunar orbit after return from the Moon. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

No one is pretending the business case isn’t there. “Those who lead in space will lead on Earth,” NASA’s acting administrator Sean Duffy said recently. Around the same time, China conducted key tests of its Long March 10 rocket and Lanyue lander—components of its crewed lunar program—while continuing to position the Chang’e missions toward long-term exploration of the Moon’s south pole, a region believed to contain water ice and other valuable resources.

Sean Duffy expressed determination to ensure the U.S. reaches the Moon’s south pole before China, framing the mission as a high-stakes competition.

“Building even a modest lunar habitat to accommodate a small crew would demand megawatt-scale power generation. Solar arrays and batteries alone cannot reliably meet those demands,” Dr Sungwoo Lim, senior lecturer in space applications, exploration and instrumentation at the University of Surrey, told the BBC. “Nuclear energy is not only desirable, it is inevitable.”

Whoever operates the first reactor on the Moon may do more than generate electricity. As legal experts have noted, a power plant would create a “keep-out zone” for safety reasons—effectively a de facto territorial claim. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans ownership of celestial bodies, but it says little about exclusive operational zones. The ambiguity of its “due regard” clause may soon be tested, as states interpret it to justify control over valuable craters and resource sites.

Moonshine

Despite all the excitement, helium-3 mining remains quite a challenge. A U.S. Geological Survey assessment still calls it an “inferred unrecoverable resource.” Apollo samples showed concentrations in mere parts per billion. Extracting and shipping it home could cost billions for every liter produced. Even if it could be done, helium-3 fusion remains out of reach, for now. As the physicist Frank Close once wrote, the idea may be “moonshine.”

But in another sense, it doesn’t have to work—not yet. The early efforts are about proving that lunar resources can be extracted, setting the rules for who gets what, and establishing infrastructure that makes future ventures possible.

That vision is what’s drawing governments, companies, and investors into the fray. Half of all 450 lunar missions planned through 2033 are commercial, expected to generate over $150 billion in revenue. Corporations are already filing claims for lunar radio spectrum ahead of the 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference, where most of the agenda will focus on space.

The first nation to power a reactor, refine a gas, or refuel a spacecraft there may redefine what ownership means beyond our planet.