Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Moon Mining with Interlune CEO Rob Meyerson 3/13/24

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

Interlune is emerging from stealth, closing an $18 million seed funding round, led by Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian’s firm 776. Founded by two former Blue Origin executives, the startup aims to harvest natural resources from space and sell to commercial and government customers. CEO Rob Meyerson joins Morgan Brennan to lay out the company’s strategy and building out the in-space industry.

Moon mining. Once the fodder of science fiction, a new company is making a big bet that the world will need the natural resources plentiful on the moon. Interlune is just emerging from stealth this week. Four years in the making, the startup was founded by two alum of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, former president Rob Meyerson and former chief engineer Gary Lai, as well as Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmidt, one of the last Americans to walk on the moon. Meyerson says his entire career has been leading up to this moment. First off is Artemis. The billions that are being spent means that both from the government and from commercial companies, it means that the infrastructure is there to go to the moon, move around the moon, power and communications. All that infrastructure is being built and it's something that we can rely on. Number two, the use cases are there.

The quantum computing, superconducting quantum computing needs the resource we're going after, which is Hel helium-3. And helium-3 is plentiful in space and plentiful on the moon, but not so very, very scarce on Earth. Interlune recently closed an $18 million seed funding round, led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian's firm, 776. And it comes as lunar missions begin to ramp. Most recently, Interlune partnered Intuitive Machines, which made history with its first commercial lunar lander last month. On this episode, Meyerson lays out the strategy for what is literally a moonshot and why Helium-3 is such a valuable resource.

I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now, Rob Meyerson, the former president of Blue Origin, also the founder and CEO of Daela Loon, and now as well a co-founder in a new space startup. Rob, talk to me about this new space startup that's emerging from stealth. Thanks, Morgan, for having me. The new company is Interloon, and we're launching this week. And very excited to have raised money to go harvest natural resources from space. As you well know, the Artemis program is NASA's program of record. There is billions of dollars being spent going back to the moon and on to Mars. And Interloon is going to be the company, the commercial company that's there harvesting resources from space to serve commercial purposes, serve commercial customers here on Earth and eventually customers in space.

Why is now the moment to build this company? Wow, that's now is the moment. I've been working my whole career to get to this point. Excuse me. And first off is Artemis. The billions that are being spent means that both from the government and from commercial companies, it means that the infrastructure is there to go to the moon, move around the moon, power and communications. All that infrastructure is being built and it's something that we can rely on. Number two, the use cases are there. The quantum computing, superconducting quantum computing needs the resource we're going after, which is helium-3. And helium-3 is plentiful in space and plentiful on the moon, but not so very, very scarce on Earth.

And then I think the third point is the geopolitical question. The moon is of interest to a lot of different countries, of course, the U.S., but China and India. And we need to dial up, we need to work hard to get there. We need to establish our presence there. And having a commercial business, a commercial purpose for doing so is the right first step to take that. Okay. How big do you expect this lunar economy to be? I realize we're still in early stages. I mean, we just marked a historic milestone with the landing and successful mission of intuitive machines. But to your point, Artemis, the human spaceflight missions continue to slip in terms of timeline. So how big is the

economy now? How much is hinging on some of these government milestones being realized here in the coming months and coming years? Yeah, the lunar economy, the in-space part of that economy is small and one wouldn't start a business to produce water or rocket propellants today. That's why we're focused on helium-3 because the market on Earth is growing. It's quite scarce. And we want to be a supplier that provides a stable and increasing supply of helium-3 to support that growing demand. Over time, over the next 15 plus years, we see the in-space economy growing to tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. And that is water, that's rocket propellant, that's industrial metals and other construction materials to support living and working in space. When does your company get to the moon?

What's the timeline? Our first mission we want to conduct in late 2026. We want to do a prospecting mission. We're going to fly on what we call a CLPS class mission. NASA's CLPS program is developing small cargo landers like the one just recently flown by Intuitive Machines. There are a number of companies producing these small cargo landers, and we want to use one to do a prospecting mission. Towards the end of the decade, in 2028 and 2030,

we'll take advantage of the larger landers that are being developed by companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX, and fly our operating plant to the moon to commercially produce and return Helium-3 our operating plant to the moon to produce, commercially produce and return Helium-3 and other resources. What is it gonna take to be able to produce

and then return these resources? Because it does feel like, and I say this, like I guess in quotations, that it's easy to get to space or maybe it's not easy to get to the moon, but you can get there, but then getting back in some ways is the holy grail. Yeah. Yeah.

So you've got to remember, like, we're rebuilding an entire industrial base around going to the moon and getting back. We had this in Apollo. Those companies really don't exist today in the, you know, organizations by the names that they were back then. So, Eclipse and Artemis are really rebuilding this whole industrial base. And the Intuitive Machines landing was the first, you know, demonstration that this program is working. There's going to be a dozen missions to the moon between now and the end of 2026 by NASA and other international organizations. And so we're just at the very beginning of this

increased operational cadence. So it is hard, but it's a lot closer than you think, this future that we're building this company on. You mentioned helium-3 and how rare that is on Earth, but I guess just to take a step back and ask a very basic question, when we talk about whether it is Helium-3, whether it is some of the other resources that could be extracted from the Moon, what's so meaningful about them? Yeah, so Helium-3, like I mentioned, it's extremely rare on Earth. There is very trace amounts that came from the formation of the Earth. But today, most of the helium-3 that is used for businesses like border security or low-temperature cryogenic research, that all comes from the decay of tritium. Tritium is extremely rare in itself, and it's heavy hydrogen. It's very, very rare. It's used in our nuclear weapons stockpile. It's a byproduct of some heavy water fission reactors.

And tritium decays over a 12 and a half year half-life to helium-3, which is a stable isotope. Helium-3 is created naturally in the sun. So the natural fusion process in the sun so that helium-3 is transported through space via the solar wind and it's been implanted on the moon for billions of years. It's not implanted on Earth because Earth has a magnetosphere so that solar wind mixture with helium-3 gets deflected around the Earth and it's all been implanted on the moon. So and we know that from Apollo. We have Apollo samples that have demonstrated the availability of the helium-3 and we use that Apollo data and other remote sensing data to identify our first locations for prospecting and harvesting. Okay.

I would imagine robotics is gonna play a very heavy hand in all this. So what does it mean in terms of the development of the hardware and the technology as it's happening here in real time on earth? Yeah, the core technologies that we're developing are excavation of large volumes of regolith lunar soil, extraction of the solar wind volatile gas, and then separation of the helium-3 from that gas. It's all going to

be done robotically with control centers on Earth monitoring during the lunar day and then we'll sleep during the lunar night. The system is going to be designed to operate for multiple years without human intervention. That is a challenge, but it's done pretty routinely in planetary missions. And the experts and the folks that we're working with are we're confident that we can go make that make that happen. You referenced Apollo and some of the data and some of the collection that's happened through Apollo which was five decades ago. What's incredible to me is the fact that one of your co-founders is an Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmidt. What does he bring to the table? I'm very curious what these conversations look like. Boy, our team is excellent. And Harrison, he goes by Jack. Jack is involved every day with us. Spoke with him yesterday. Since his Apollo mission, he went on to become a senator.

He's been on the boards of some very important companies. And he's, throughout all that, been actively involved in the Lunar Science Community, has brought in a scientific advisory group that helps us. And he is still actively re-looking at Apollo samples that he himself gathered and his fellow Apollo astronauts gathered with the new information and new things to be looking for based on our business plan. So he is a critical member of the team along with Andrew Hornsby, Gary Lai, our CTO, and James Antifa, our head of product. Yeah, and Gary Lai, I think, was also a Blue Origin alum like you.

In terms of the experience learned and going through the process of running Blue Origin, which we know has a lunar component to it with Blue Moon, et cetera, I guess how did that shape your ability to now go out and start this company and make this big bet on this emerging market that could be so much bigger than really anything we've seen on earth? Yeah, that's so one of the last things I worked on it at Blue Origin was Blue Moon. And that was shaping the idea, which led to the development of CLPS and HLS, the human lander system, the big vehicle.

We brought in some of the key people at Blue to start that program. And I was involved in that before leaving in 2018. But the idea that building the heavy lifting infrastructure, the road to space as Blue Origin calls it, that idea really did influence my thinking about this because I believe that by the end of this decade, we will have competing sources for transportation

between the earth and the moon, including launch, landing, mobility, and Interloon's been founded to take advantage of that. I mean, you're also on the board of Axiom, and last time you and I spoke, which I think was May of 2023, we were talking about that company. They just finished their third human space flight,

their third mission. I guess, how does that speak to, as well, this emerging space economy? The fact that we're at a point now where not only are, you know, trips and missions for NASA becoming more commonplace, thanks in part to SpaceX, but some of these commercial trips and private missions are also becoming more commonplace. They sure are. And there's countries now signing up to fly to space, to the ISS with Axiom. And of course, Axiom's make progress on their destination itself, which is the, you know, the big idea behind Axiom. Axiom, Interloon, other private companies, you know, I got to emphasize enough, we don't do this without NASA. NASA is a critical, critical customer. But that future where NASA is one of many customers is what we're all striving for and leaning into. And I think they're doing it really well with more commercial, you know, procurement mechanisms like, you know, leading with COTS, commercial crew, CLPS, as I mentioned, commercial LEO, these those contracting mechanisms, depends on NASA buying a service, demonstrating that, you know, sending that signal to the industry, buying that service. That's the most

important thing that NASA can do to help companies like Interloon, Axiom, and others that are out there. The other key piece of this, of course, is the investment community, VCs and others basically putting money to work, private capital to work in startups like Interloon as well. 776 just led your most recent funding round, I guess. Talk to me about what the investment sentiment, investor sentiment shift has looked like here. And I realize that you bring a unique expertise and perspective to this, both as an investor yourself over the years and also as a consultant more broadly in the industry. Yeah, it's first off having 776, Alexis Ohanian and Caitlin Holloway lead our round,

take a significant stake and commitment into Interloon. Caitlin is joining our board and we're just honored to be a part of their portfolio, which includes companies like Stokes Space. Investing in space is challenging and it takes a commitment. It's not by committee. You need a leader, someone to step up and lead that investment round. And having 776 as our lead really sends a message. The message for us is the support. This is a $15 million investment round, Morgan.

It's a pretty big investment round for a commercial lunar company. And we, you know, we feel just blessed to have a lead like 776 stepping up there. They're, as you know, they're not a space investor. They're a generalist investor, which means that they see the future in this business, not just because it's space, but because it's a commercial business that's serving a real purpose. So just walk me through what that business plan looks like then in terms of being a commercial business. And you mentioned 2026 to be able to bring a payload to the lunar surface. You know, I've had, it's an interesting time, right?

Because tighter financial conditions, higher interest rates, VC funding, for example, has pulled back, we'll say writ large across a number of industries and funding has been a much more, a tighter thing. And so there has been some, I guess, discussion to be had, a debate to be had about what that means for investment in space and whether investing, for example, in the lunar economy is something

that's gonna be realized in 10 years or it's gonna be a longer term trajectory. How do you think about it? Well, first off, venture capitalists have pulled back in the growth rounds, but the early rounds, the seed and series A, those rounds are still getting closed. There's pretty significant size venture rounds that have been done in space. But because of our focus on Helium 3, which is a resource that supports national security, quantum computing, and eventually fusion and medical diagnostics. There are other rounds being closed in areas of quantum and fusion.

Maybell Quantum just closed a $25 million round just a few weeks ago. Their business is dependent on helium-3 they build dilution refrigerators for the superconducting quantum computing industry so they need what we're producing and so um that uh another you know chevron and made it made a hundred million dollar investment in another quantum computing company recently uh more than $6 billion has been invested in Fusion in the recent time. So while that's not all going into Helium 3, it's just indicative of investors' deep-seated belief in some of these markets that we intend to serve. Have you already signed on commercial customers?

Yeah, we have signed on, we have a long list of commercial customers, more than, more than a billion dollars in letters of intent signed. We are working hard to convert those into, you know, contracts with, you know, payment milestones. And that's the, that's what we're going to do during this seed round. But a lot of commercial interest in, in what we're trying to do and what we are doing. And that's given us a lot of comfort and really was the reason we were able to raise the seed round. OK, one more question for you, maybe a basic question. How do you transport helium-3 back to Earth?

So helium-3 is a gas. The amount that we're going to be bringing back is in the single-digit kilograms. So small amounts of pressurized gas will be brought back. And the payload size is very much in line with what NASA would like to bring back, you know, scientific samples, rocks, and samples of lunar regolith during the Artemis program. So there are several companies out there that are looking to develop ways to do this, but that size of payload is in line with a lot of companies that are already offering services

to bring payloads back to Earth from low Earth orbit. And so we have some ideas for our own design, but we're also working very closely with others. And I know this isn't the clearest answer for you, Morgan, but we have several different options for how we would do that. All right. Well, I look forward to seeing how all of this unfolds and learning more about those options as you build them. Rob Meyerson, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Morgan. I look forward to speaking with you again. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never

miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.