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A stealth startup led by antique - Blue Origin leadership , focus on harvesting resource from the lunar month , has quietly fold a sizable new tranche of funding , accord toregulatory document .
Interlune , a inauguration that ’s been around for at least three years but has made almost zero public announcements about its technical school , has raised $ 15.5 million in raw funding and aims to come together another $ 2 million . A voice for Interlune declined to comment on this story .
This is the first public indication that the ship’s company has closed any funding since a $ 1.85 million seeded player round in 2022 .
Much of what ’s known about the inauguration was reported byGeekWire last October , when Interlune CTO Gary Lai briefly describe the startup during a speech at Seattle ’s Museum of Flight : “ We aim to be the first company that harvests natural resources from the moon to expend here on Earth , ” he reportedly enjoin . “ We ’re build up a completely novel advance to extract those resources , expeditiously , cost - effectively and also responsibly . The destination is really to create a sustainable in - space saving . ”
Lai is an aerospace engineer whose resume includes a 20 - year Erolia minutilla at Blue Origin , where he eventually became principal designer for quad transportation systems , include launchers and lunar landers . Interlune is being led by Rob Meyerson , an aerospace executive who was Chief Executive at Blue Origin for 15 age . Meyerson is also a fecund angel investor , with investments in well - known ironware startup including Axiom Space , Starfish Space , Hermeus and Hadrian Automation .
The filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission also lists lawyer H. Indra Hornsby as a troupe executive . Hornsby antecedently held the position of general counsel at BlackSky and Spaceflight Industries , and also worked as an executive VP at Rocket Lab .
What little else is known of Interlune ’s tech comes from an abstract of a small SBIR the startup was award last year from the National Science Foundation . Under that award , the fellowship articulate it will take aim to “ develop a core enabling applied science for lunar in situ resourcefulness utilization : the power to sort ‘ moonlight dirt ’ ( lunar regolith ) by particle size . ”
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“ By enable raw lunar regolith to be sort into multiple streams by particle size of it , the engineering will allow appropriate feedstocks for lunar oxygen extraction organization , lunar 3 - dimensional printing machine , and other applications,”the abstract articulate .
A growing bit of space startups are concentre on what ’s known as in - situ resourcefulness use ( ISRU ) , or pile up and transform space resources into valuable commodities . Much of this is driven by NASA ’s state priority to progress a long - term human outpost on the moon via its Artemis computer program : The bureau acknowledges that longer - terminal figure stays in quad will require the ability to generate materials topically — whether that ’s to build roads , produce breathable air or even make rocket propellent .
But it is n’t just inauguration that are try on to commercialize ISRU tech ; last year , Blue Origin announced that it had made solar prison cell and transmittance wire out of a material that ’s chemically identical to lunar regolith .
In itsFebruary 2023 announcement on the tech , Blue Origin say , “ memorize to live off the demesne – on the Moon and on Mars – will ask extensive collaboration across the ISRU community . ” The idiomatic expression is resound in Interlune ’s abstract : “ The use of the Moon ’s resource is a disruptive capability that will enable missions there to ‘ live on off the country , ’ making the maturation of this applied science important for governance agencies and industry likewise . ”
