NASA Awards $6.9 Million Contract to Advance Lunar Resource Extraction
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NASA has awarded a $6.9 million contract to Interlune of Seattle to develop technology for extracting resources from lunar soil. The work aims to increase the self-sufficiency of future Moon and Mars missions by reducing the need to transport supplies from Earth. The contract is funded through a NASA Small Business Innovation Research program.
Facts First
- NASA awarded a $6.9 million contract to Interlune for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) technology development.
- The goal is to extract resources like hydrogen and helium-3 from lunar regolith to support long-duration missions.
- Interlune will design hardware to collect, sort, and analyze lunar soil samples.
- The technology builds on NASA's MSOLO mass spectrometer, which was demonstrated on a 2025 lunar mission.
- The contract is a Phase III SBIR award, a mechanism for transitioning technology into NASA missions or the private sector.
What Happened
NASA has awarded a firm-fixed-price contract worth $6.9 million to Interlune of Seattle. The contract, funded through a Phase III NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award, will support the company's work over the next 1.5 years. Interlune will use the funding to advance technologies for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), which is the capability to use available resources on other planetary bodies.
Why this Matters to You
This development may eventually reduce the cost and complexity of human exploration beyond Earth. If successful, technologies that extract resources like water ice or gases from lunar soil could enable longer missions to the Moon and Mars without requiring all supplies to be launched from Earth. For you, this represents a step toward more sustainable and ambitious space exploration, which could lead to new scientific discoveries and economic opportunities in the coming decades.
What's Next
Under the contract, Interlune will design, build, and test engineering development units and flight hardware to collect lunar regolith samples, sort particles by size, extract solar wind volatile gases, and measure their quantities. The company's design includes a mass spectrometer inspired by NASA's MSOLO technology. NASA's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs are adopting a new Broad Agency Announcement framework this year, and the 2026-2027 appendices for proposal topics close on May 21.