Interlune Signs $300M Deal to Harvest Helium-3 for Quantum Computing from the Moon (msn.com) 60
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:
Finnish tech firm Bluefors, a maker of ultracold refrigerator systems critical for quantum computing, has purchased tens of thousands of liters of Helium-3 from the moon — spending "above $300 million" — through a commercial space company called Interlune. The agreement, which has not been previously reported, marks the largest purchase of a natural resource from space.
Interlune, a company founded by former executives from Blue Origin and an Apollo astronaut, has faced skepticism about its mission to become the first entity to mine the moon (which is legal thanks to a 2015 law that grants U.S. space companies the rights to mine on celestial bodies). But advances in its harvesting technology and the materialization of commercial agreements are gradually making this undertaking sound less like science fiction. Bluefors is the third customer to sign up, with an order of up to 10,000 liters of Helium-3 annually for delivery between 2028 and 2037...
Helium-3 is lighter than the Helium-4 gas featured at birthday parties. It's also much rarer on Earth. But moon rock samples from the Apollo days hint at its abundance there. Interlune has placed the market value at $20 million per kilogram (about 7,500 liters). "It's the only resource in the universe that's priced high enough to warrant going out to space today and bringing it back to Earth," said Rob Meyerson [CEO of Interlune and former president of Blue Origin]...
[H]eat, even in small doses, can cause qubits to produce errors. That's where Helium-3 comes in. Bluefors makes the cooling technology that allows the computer to operate — producing chandelier-type structures known as dilution refrigerators. Their fridges, used by quantum computer leader IBM, contain a mixture of Helium-3 and Helium-4 that pushes temperatures below 10 millikelvins (or minus-460 degrees Fahrenheit)... Existing quantum computers have been built with more than a thousand qubits, he said, but a commercial system or data center would need a million or more. That could require perhaps thousands of liters of Helium-3 per quantum computer. "They will need more Helium-3 than is available on planet Earth," said Gary Lai [a co-founder and chief technology officer of Interlune, who was previously the chief architect at Blue Origin]. Most Helium-3 on Earth, he said, comes from the decay of tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) in nuclear weapons stockpiles, but between 22,000 and 30,000 liters are made each year...
"We estimate there's more than a million metric tons of Helium-3 on the moon," Meyerson said. "And it's been accumulating there for 4 billion years." Now, they just need to get it.
Interlune CEO Meyerson tells the post "It's really all about establishing a resilient supply chain for this critical material" — adding that in the long-term he could also see Helium-3 being used for other purposes including fusion energy.
Interlune, a company founded by former executives from Blue Origin and an Apollo astronaut, has faced skepticism about its mission to become the first entity to mine the moon (which is legal thanks to a 2015 law that grants U.S. space companies the rights to mine on celestial bodies). But advances in its harvesting technology and the materialization of commercial agreements are gradually making this undertaking sound less like science fiction. Bluefors is the third customer to sign up, with an order of up to 10,000 liters of Helium-3 annually for delivery between 2028 and 2037...
Helium-3 is lighter than the Helium-4 gas featured at birthday parties. It's also much rarer on Earth. But moon rock samples from the Apollo days hint at its abundance there. Interlune has placed the market value at $20 million per kilogram (about 7,500 liters). "It's the only resource in the universe that's priced high enough to warrant going out to space today and bringing it back to Earth," said Rob Meyerson [CEO of Interlune and former president of Blue Origin]...
[H]eat, even in small doses, can cause qubits to produce errors. That's where Helium-3 comes in. Bluefors makes the cooling technology that allows the computer to operate — producing chandelier-type structures known as dilution refrigerators. Their fridges, used by quantum computer leader IBM, contain a mixture of Helium-3 and Helium-4 that pushes temperatures below 10 millikelvins (or minus-460 degrees Fahrenheit)... Existing quantum computers have been built with more than a thousand qubits, he said, but a commercial system or data center would need a million or more. That could require perhaps thousands of liters of Helium-3 per quantum computer. "They will need more Helium-3 than is available on planet Earth," said Gary Lai [a co-founder and chief technology officer of Interlune, who was previously the chief architect at Blue Origin]. Most Helium-3 on Earth, he said, comes from the decay of tritium (an isotope of hydrogen) in nuclear weapons stockpiles, but between 22,000 and 30,000 liters are made each year...
"We estimate there's more than a million metric tons of Helium-3 on the moon," Meyerson said. "And it's been accumulating there for 4 billion years." Now, they just need to get it.
Interlune CEO Meyerson tells the post "It's really all about establishing a resilient supply chain for this critical material" — adding that in the long-term he could also see Helium-3 being used for other purposes including fusion energy.
Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck it, I'm seeking $500 million to harvest unicorn farts from Uranus.
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You would need to add at least a couple of 0s for it to even begin to seem reasonable.
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Indeed. Seems we are even closer to idiocracy than I thought.
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I'll sell you twice the helium for half the price! (Score:5, Funny)
I guarantee, if you don't have your Helium-3 within 100 years, I'll give you your money back!
Ozone impacts (Score:2)
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At this time it is not even clear whether "quantum computing" actually works and even can work. The factorization record, after something like 50 years of intense research, is at 35. Not 35 bits, 35. All other claimed records are fakes. 35 is 5 bits and that is not enough to even conclusively prove it was a quantum computation.
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I think the lesson to be learned here. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Nothing larger works without independent oversight. Somebody greedy, without morals and with no interest in the common good always finds a way to corrupt it.
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They and many others. Obviously they get ignored and the same drastically stupid mistakes get made time and again.
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Free market capitalism has as a core principle the importance of market forces. That is, democracy.
Zuckerberg gained control of billions of dollars because he correctly judged that the people wanted to play hot or not with pictures of their friends and would accept psychological manipulation in return. He spent billions on VR because he thought it would work even better.
If you're American, "democracy" has had lots of opportunities to spend money on health care and does so to considerable excess.
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"Free market" is a stupid propaganda cliche that is devoid of meaning.
There are two kinds of markets - competitive and markets with restricted competition.
The markets with restricted competition have the unfortunate feature of "economic profits", money in excess of the economically efficient rates of return. There is only one profitable way to invest this money, and it is to "invest" it into the political process, that is, to bribe the political system so that it extends and even institutionalizes the lack
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What he's saying, is that people voted with their wallets.
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What he's saying is that he's an indoctrinated idiot without even basic idea of how this shit works.
Zuck was one of several government projects along the same lines back then, and he got lucky, that's all.
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Seems like he's not the only "indoctrinated idiot".
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Ah, did you you accidentally switch on the web camera? Congrats, it is working.
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Oh dear, I'm sorry I didn't read this before replying above.
So is he a CIA operator indoctrinated from birth a la The Bourne Identity, a genetically programmed clone, or a straight up android?
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Uh huh. Is this one of those "propaganda I don't believe" Instagram slideshows?
Free markets exist and are pretty widespread. They require government intervention to maintain. Adam Smith himself called that one of the primary functions of government in the economy. American corporatism isn't the only system in the world, and authoritarian "democratic oversight" as suggested by the OP is definitely not a good alternative.
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You demonstrated you ignorance already, no need do double-down. The very definition of a "free market" is a market where only current supply and demand determine price and output.
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Aw, I'm disappointed there's no reply on Zuckerberg's origins.
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The lesson to be learned here is that there's a sucker born every minute. Also you "allowed" Zuck to waste billions on VR because PEOPLE VOLUNTARILY GAVE HIM THE MONEY. People had the choice to spend money on other things and instead bought ads on Facebook. They voted with their wallets. There's your democracy in action.
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is that unfettered capitalism does not work, it needs oversight from a Democracy. We need to check these Oligarchs who spends precious resources on bull shit. For example, Zuck, who spent Billions on VR, why did we as a Democracy allow that? We could have spent it on food, or health care.
You ... aren't serious, right?
You used some sort of left-wing gibberish generator; please tell me that you did?
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It is not a democracy if you are telling individuals what they can spend their money on. You should probably oughta stop smoking the ganja bro. What you are describing is literally a dictatorship.
How puzzling... (Score:3)
Unless I'm missing something there's an annual quantity(of up to 10,000 liters; no stated minimum so presumably including zero) and a delivery period; but there's no actual statement of which years the annual quantity applies to(are they the same as the years of the delivery period? Do they start immediately?) and no statement of either when the product gets paid for or of what happens if it ends up not being delivered.
Depending on those fairly nontrivial details this could be anything from "refrigerator company spends 300 million dollars on lunar widget today with payoff potentially a decade or more out" to "if you happen to have some helium 3 in 2035 Bluefors will take your call; today we shake hands and make effusive statements in preparation for the bubble vacuum that the fall of 'genAI' will leave".
I'm fairly sure that there have been enough actual commodities deals(both actual sales and various options-related hedging) that if they wanted to talk boring details they would know exactly which ones to mention; which makes me suspect that it's less exciting than it is intended to appear.
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Indeed. It is a possibility this is nothing but an empty press release that is not based on anything real. The amount of hallucination in it would suggest so.
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You are basically saying it is a lie with some cover story. That is also possible.
Give the extreme price and low production of Helium 3 on earth (it is basically only produced as Tritium decay product), "some other source" is just as fantastical as getting it from the moon.
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18.4 liters per year from warhead tritium (Score:4, Informative)
I think the US is good for high single thousands of liters on a typical year, from nuclear warhead maintenance; Russia at least theoretically in the same ballpark in terms of warheads that would need their tritium checked, th
Per Wikipedia, the estimated quantity of tritium in a warhead is 4 grams, with decay of this producing about 0.20 grams of 3He per warhead per year ([ref [wikipedia.org]]. The US has 5277 nuclear warheads, Russia a similar number, with 12,331 warheads total in the world. ([ref [icanw.org]]. Multiplying, that's 2.4 kilograms of 3He per year. Density of Helium 3 is 0.134 grams per liter at standard temperature and pressure, so I get 18.4 liters per year produced from decay of tritium in all of the nuclear warheads in the world, about 40% of it in the U.S.
Wouldn't hurt to check my math, but unless I slipped a decimal, thousands of liters per year is an overestimate.
I have seen this movie (Score:1)
They build resort style living on the moon to fund the project that ends up causing the moon to fracture altering the gravitational influence resulting is earthquakes and the human population diverging into two distinct species one that lives above and one that lives below.
The Eloi and Morlocks if memory serves me correctly.
Re: I have seen this movie (Score:2)
Hoping they fail or are prevented (Score:2)
Would be good to see other nations interfere in their mining efforts until we have more comprehensive international agreements around mining and we're sure it would not interfere with any current or future scientific efforts.
That quite an accomplishment! (Score:4, Insightful)
Packing this much complete nonsense and utterly wishful thinking into a "business plan" that has no chance of getting realized anytime soon (or at all) and still getting a ton of money for it.
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If NASA had thought of this, they could have gone to the moon much more cheaply. Typical government waste.
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I don't think he's getting money. I think he's laundering money.
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If they had actually brought some helium back even once, this would be a reasonable deal... but WTF?
We'll get ... (Score:2)
Inadequate name (Score:2)
Surely "interlune" implies transport between 2 or more instances of a moon, without Earth's involvement. A better fitting name would be "moon-to-Earth" or, for those who smell bullshit about this announcement, "ass-to-mouth".
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Interlune ... that's lune as in lunatic.
Suck It Boyz !!!!! da moon is made of chaddar (Score:1)
and its coming to me !!
Whoo!! my Lunar Deeds are gonna FINALLY pay off ... but hey im not greedy guy .
i haz a few lots im parting with on ebay .. get em while their still cheap because Hel3 is the next bacon Boom Baby !!!
Now we will have (Score:2)
Strip mines visible from Earth! (Score:3)
This will be fucking great. They'll strip mine the moon, and then we can all see their mess from Earth.
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Why not? It's a barren rock devoid of life. Not that $300 million will get you anywhere close to a lunar mining operation.
Don't know whose dumber: Bluefors or Interlune (Score:2)
A City on Mars (Score:1)
Not sure of that valuation (Score:3)
Interlune has placed the market value at $20 million per kilogram (about 7,500 liters). "It's the only resource in the universe that's priced high enough to warrant going out to space today and bringing it back to Earth,”
I’m not sure I believe something can cost more per kilogram then ink jet ink.
Scam (Score:2)
That million metric tons is rather evenly spread over the thirty-eight million square kilometers of the Moon. That's 26.3kg/km^2 or 263g/hectare. And that's assuming a 100% capture rate with zero leakage. (Long term storage of cryogenic substances in space has never been demonstrated.) You need to excavate down through a meter of regolith to get all of the He3. That means to get 100g of He3, you have to process 30,000 tons of Lunar regolith.
Or, you could use a TRIGA reactor to just make tritium out of deu