... crew to the Moon is only designed to orbit the Moon but not to land on the lunar surface. In order to put humans back on the Moon, NASA needs a lander. SpaceX won the competition to design the lunar lander for Artemis III, but has not yet completed a ... ... last year caused significant setbacks for SpaceX in its efforts to develop and test Starship—the new-generation super-heavy reusable spacecraft—and its lunar lander.
Additionally, in February 2026, NASA announced revisions to the architecture of its ...
... processing, meaning that extraction costs would decline as the Moon is explored. A clear illustration is
Interlune
. On May 7, 2025, the company signed an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy to deliver three liters of helium-3 mined on the Moon no later than April 2029. At the same time, commercial
agreements
were reached with
Bluefors
for volumes of up to 10,000 liters per year in 2028–2037, and with
Maybell Quantum
for thousands of liters annually in 2029–2035. Together with the heavy equipment manufacturer
Vermeer
, the company has built a full-scale prototype of a lunar excavator designed for conveyorized operation. The machine is intended to continuously strip the ...
