NASA and industry are developing technologies to extract lunar resources such as hydrogen and helium-3 from regolith to support long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars. NASA awarded Interlune of Seattle a firm-fixed-price contract worth $6.9 million over the next 1.5 years, funded through a Phase III NASA Small Business Innovation Research award, to validate critical resource-prospecting tools and advance self-sufficient lunar operations. NASA says these systems are intended to support propulsion, energy production, life support, and other deep-space needs.
The technical significance is direct: if lunar prospecting and ISRU mature, crews can convert local materials into water, oxygen, fuel, and construction inputs instead of importing nearly everything from Earth. That lowers launch mass, extends mission endurance, improves resilience against supply-chain failure, and creates the basis for permanent habitats, surface industry, and emergency survivability after Earth-side disruption. The inclusion of hydrogen and helium-3 prospecting also signals a shift toward mapping lunar resource economics, not just survival engineering.
For the Ark, the priority is to track the performance of prospecting hardware, regolith-processing methods, and validation data that could identify reliable resource zones for habitation and industrial use. The team should integrate lessons from NASA’s ISRU pathway into its own resource-assessment models, robotic excavation planning, and closed-loop life-support architecture, while monitoring whether this $6.9 million effort produces field-tested standards for detection, extraction, and material handling on the lunar surface.