Seattle-based Interlune is expanding its partnership with Vermeer, an Iowa-based industrial equipment manufacturer, to develop construction tools for use on the moon.
The two companies forged their initial strategic partnership to further Interlune’s plans to extract helium-3 from tons of moon dirt and rocks, also known as regolith. Their full-scale prototype of a lunar excavator was unveiled a little more than a year ago.
At the time, Interlune was focused on mining helium-3 and bringing it back to Earth for applications ranging from quantum computing to medical imaging and nuclear fusion. But a major shift came in March when NASA announced a 10-year, $30 billion initiative to build the infrastructure for a moon base.
Interlune co-founder and CEO Rob Meyerson said he and his teammates realized that the partnership with Vermeer could support NASA’s plans. “We went back to Vermeer … and we decided that it made sense to formally expand the partnership to focus on all these other things that we’ve had in mind,” Meyerson told me.
For example, a lunar construction project is likely to involve building roads, compacting surfaces, digging trenches for underground utilities and moving rocks to clear space for a habitat. Heavy equipment might be needed to build protective berms around nuclear reactors.
Vermeer’s president and CEO, Jason Andringa, said he’s up for the challenge. He noted that before taking charge of the business his grandfather founded nearly 80 years ago, he was a staff engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“When I left NASA and came to work for Vermeer, my hope always was to be able to re-merge my passion for aerospace, specifically for the human exploration and human colonization of the moon and Mars, with my coming back to my family business … and use what I knew Vermeer was best at on Earth to do important work on the moon and Mars,” he told me.
