On May 5, 2025, Interlune — a Seattle-based startup — announced a new agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE): they’ll deliver helium-3, harvested from the moon, to Earth by 2029. The press release, which calls the deal a “historic agreement,” explains that “Interlune will harvest three liters of helium-3 from the lunar soil and return it to Earth for the DOE and other customers using the fully operational infrastructure of its pilot plant on the moon’s surface.”

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Emma Gatti is a planetary scientist, editor and journalist, and serves as a research professor in Space Journalism and Current Affairs at the Faculty of Space Technology, AGH University of Krakow. She is also the director of The Space Republic, a media...