The US-China Nuclear Fusion Space Race
by Lawrence Kadish • June 3, 2025 at 1:00 pm
The last visitors from the planet Earth departed the Moon in December of 1972.
No one has returned to that distant destination, and yet there is now a Moon-mining startup that has signed contracts to excavate and return to Earth thousands of liters of an element called helium-3 that sits just beneath the lunar surface, starting in the year 2029.
The company, Interlune, has entered into an agreement to provide this rare and expensive resource to Maybell Quantum, a company whose CEO Corban Tillemann-Dick "wants to use Interlune's helium-3 for his company's special refrigerators that cool quantum devices to near-absolute zero temperatures." Technicians say helium-3 has amazing properties, among them, the ability to supply incredibly efficient cooling to ultra-low temperatures.
