Building a Business on the Moon

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts, then add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-IHEART. A lot of work advice sounds good in theory, but falls apart when you actually try to use it. I'm on a mission to change that. I'm Molly Graham, a company builder and the new host of Work Life, a podcast from TED. I've spent my career inside fast-growing companies, and one thing I know for sure is that work is messy. In this new season, I'm excited to share my conversations with founders, operators, and creatives about the real story behind their shiniest successes, the lessons that no one ever posts on LinkedIn. Listen now on Work Life wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin. Finally, almost 60 years later, humanity is going back to the moon. The plan, at least, is for the United States to build a base on the moon in the not terribly distant future so that the moon can be both a literal and metaphorical launching pad for humanity to explore the solar system. Rad. So, what's it going to take to build a base on the moon? A lot. The answer is a lot. I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is What's Your Problem? And my guest today is Rob Meyerson. Rob spent 15 years running Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos. And in 2020, he started a company called Interloon. Rob's problem is this. how do you build the infrastructure for a lunar economy that doesn't really exist yet? Eventually, Rob hopes Interlune will help build that base on the moon. For now, though, he's focused on a more short-term, but still not that short-term goal. Going to the moon and bringing back a gas called helium-3 to sell on Earth. Helium-3 is an isotope of helium that is wildly rare on Earth. So rare that it sells for around $10 million a pound. Helium-3 is used to identify smuggled nuclear materials at ports and border crossings. It's also used in certain kinds of quantum computing and certain forms of fusion energy. Both fusion energy and quantum computing are, of course, attracting billions of dollars in investments right now. And that is part of the reason Rob wants to go to the moon to bring back helium-3. In our conversation, we talked about a lot. Rob told me why reusable rockets are only the first step for going back to the moon, what it's going to take to actually manufacture things in space, and how he's trying to build a business by sifting through the dirt on the moon. I talked to Rob on April 10th, and I mention that because when we talked, the Artemis II astronauts were on their way back from the moon. So, of course, that's what we started with. Rob, as we're talking right now on this day, Artemis II is about 50,000 miles from the Earth, hurtling toward us at about 6,000 miles an hour. Everything goes well. It'll splash down later today. What does that mean for you? What does it mean for the moon? What does it mean for your company? Well, first off, I started my career. I'm an aerospace engineer. I started my career as a NASA co-op in 1985. So I worked on the space shuttle. I worked on aerodynamics of vehicles that reenter the atmosphere, just like Orion will do this afternoon. So you tell me you know a lot about what's about to happen. Is that what you're telling me? I do. And this is right up my alley. And I know personally, I know the people who worked on it to make it happen. and I'm super excited and I'm super confident and I'm quite honestly a little surprised at the media, like the national excitement about it that is shared because it shows that human spaceflight is different. We can generate excitement about the space program from a broader audience by doing these new and exciting things and going to the moon to stay. You know, it's like we've been to the moon before, but we haven't, like you and I, like industry today hasn't been. That was 50 plus years ago. And we have a whole new group of people that are doing it. And it's exciting to watch. It is so wild that we went to the moon and then we stopped going to the moon, right? It's weird. You would not have thought in whatever 1972 that humanity would be like, well, that's it. We're done. We went to the moon and let's just stop going to the moon now. Exactly. What's that all about? Like why quit? We don't really, it's not in our nature. I mean, there's so much more to learn on the moon. There's so much more to benefit from. So going back to stay is, it really matters. Well, and as you point out, right, so this is Artemis II, right? And Artemis I was the same thing, but without people, right? And it is much more exciting when there are people on board, which I get as a, you know, as a human being, as an English major, whatever. On a certain level, it's not entirely rational, right? Because you could do a lot without people. Certainly easier to go without people. There's a lot less to worry about. And yet, it's so much more exciting when there are people doing it. There are. You can talk to my co-founder, Harrison Schmidt, who walked on the moon on Apollo 17. But the anecdotes you hear from these Artemis II astronauts, You know, that spacecraft that flew around the moon on Artemis 1 didn't tell us what it was seeing. These astronauts are telling us that the moon looks brown. That's a surprise. It's all about lighting, and it's about the human observation, what the eye can see that you don't necessarily see. No, I don't believe you, right? It's about feelings. You're saying something. I don't believe what you're saying, right? Okay. Yeah. All right. It is. You're right. You're right. It is all about feelings, and it's making me feel great right now. And I think that there's a lot of people that feel the way I do. So I want to talk about your kind of short-to-medium-term plans at Interloon. But to start, since we're already talking about astronauts and the moon and whatever, let's actually start with, like, your big dream of, you know, humanity and the moon and where Interloon fits in. Sure. So reusable rockets are something that is here to stay. Like I worked on the space shuttle. I worked on a private company called Kistler that didn't make it. And then I went to Blue Origin and spent 15 years there building reusable rockets. And SpaceX right alongside their, you know, these companies are building rockets that are being reused in a way that will lower the cost of spaceflight and eventually lower the price of spaceflight. Yeah. But that only gets you so far, Jacob. The next lever for lowering the cost of space missions is to build things in space using resources that you've sourced from space. So metals, rocket fuel, helium-3, helium gas. so there will be factories in space building things that will support a long-term in-space economy and our big vision for interloon is that we're we're the you know the central cog in that providing the resources that are used to build build things and and once you get that second flywheel that in-space manufacturing flywheel going alongside the reusable rocket flywheel then you you kind of see where the costs and where these economics can go in the long term. Why did you start the company? I mean, you were president at Blue Origin. That's a cool space job, building rockets to go to space or almost to space. What led you to start Interloon Yeah so I been at Blue Origin for 15 years I was the president for most of those years I recognized that the infrastructure that we need to do things long-term on the moon and in space is being built by companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX. But I also noticed that the Artemis program, which was created under the first Trump administration to go back to the moon to stay, was continued by the Biden administration. And that was the first time in my career that a major NASA program of record had been continued through the change of administration. Which meant to me that there is a lot of support for going to the moon and on to Mars, what the Artemis program was created for. And I knew that now was the time to go do that. So you have this idea, oh, like the U.S. government is serious about going back to the moon. I'm interested in getting into the moon business. How do you get from there to helium-3? So my co-founder, Harrison Schmidt, is the only geologist to walk on the moon. That's a cool business card, right? He is one of a kind. And I met him in 2016 when I was at Blue Origin. We talked about helium-3 at that time. But he was focused on fusion energy. And going to the moon in 2016 to get helium-3 for fusion is the classic two-miracle business plan. Right. Because fusion is not a thing. Like, there is not commercial fusion. People are working on it. There's a lot of money pouring into it, but it's not happening. So that's one miracle. Yeah. Yeah, that's the one miracle. And the second is the moon. But what happened since then is that the Artemis program was created by NASA, and there's money being invested in lunar landers, lunar rovers, and all lunar infrastructure. That's one miracle eliminated. Exactly. What's the other miracle that gets eliminated? Well, so the fusion energy part of it, we realized that we could build a pretty good business to support quantum computing. Because the truth is, over the next 10 to 20 years, there will be people scaling up quantum computers from 100 qubits to 1,000 to 10,000 to a million. And a million-qubit quantum computer will need as much helium-3 as we produce in the United States in one year. So the future I want to see is a data center full of million-qubit quantum computers. But the fact is we won't be able to support that future with the helium-3 we have on Earth. Is that data center in space in the future of your dreams? Well, I'm not going to go there, Jacob. It might. It might. But that data center with quantum computers will need a lot of helium-3 and we'll need to go to space. We'll need to go to the moon to get that helium-3. Okay. So I got the plan. That's the plan. I can see it on the whiteboard with a few arrows. Yep. What do you have to do to actually make that happen, right? So you mentioned that lots of other people are building lots of other things, right? You're building some piece of it. So, like, what do you have to figure out? Yeah. So 10 years ago, there was no lunar landers being built in the U.S. There was no lunar rovers being built in the U.S. Today, there is many companies building those. And if you think of the technologies we need as a tech stack, that rover provides the wheels, the transmission, the drivetrain, the mobility that we need. And what we need is we need to excavate large volumes of lunar soil, regolith. We need to sort it. We need to sort the rocks from the sand because we know that the solar wind implants the helium-3 and other solar wind gases in the outer nanometer thick rind of the lunar regolith. The lunar regolith is the dirt, basically, on the moon, yes? And out of nanometer, you're just saying, in the tiniest sliver of the surface is where the helium-3 is. Yeah. So you want to get the rocks out because the rocks aren't going to be the high-volume producer of the helium-3. You want to get the fine sand. Then we want to do a mechanical process where we crush the regolith and we release those solar wind gases, and then we cryogenically separate the helium-3 from the helium. And that last step, that cryogenic separation is... That part sounds harder than the other parts. It is. And we've developed it here in Seattle. We're operating below 2 Kelvin, which is just, you know, 2 degrees above absolute zero. And what we've demonstrated is that we can enrich helium-3 helium mixtures from very, very low, 0.00002% helium-3 and helium, to 99%. And what that represents is that this needle in a haystack in the helium-3 we have on Earth, the very, very trace amounts of helium-3, We can go use this technology that we've envisioned, we've developed for the moon, but we can use it on Earth in a grade A helium plant. We can extract helium-3 in 2028 before we get to the moon. And we can sell that helium-3 to our customers in the quantum computing industry. Wait, just so I felt it, when you say you can extract helium-3 in 2028 before you get to the moon, do you mean you're going to be in the helium-3 business on Earth just by extracting the trace amounts of helium-3? that are here? Yep. Yeah. And we, we kind of, we came upon this wrinkle in the business plan as we were working back from the original moon architecture. And that's, that's how a lot of these things happen. You know, you, you have this grand vision, you work backward from it. You start developing core technologies, excavation, size sorting, extraction, separation. And then we realized, hey, well, this cryogenic separation process, which is hard on the moon, it'll work on earth too. The problem is there's, when there's a million tons of helium-3 on the moon, there's a very, very small amounts on earth. So we can, we can maybe triple the U.S. supply of helium-3 if we maximize, if we pull every molecule of helium-3 out. But on the moon, we can 10x, 100x, 1,000x, 10,000x the helium-3 production. And we can do that in a managed, scaled fashion to allow the market to catch up. So we want to operate on the moon, and we want to make space resources available on Earth and in space to solve some of these big problems. And that's what we're focused on. So when are you going to send something to the moon? When do you get to go to the moon? Well, we, yeah, great question. We have a camera that we're going to send this fall with a company called Astrolab. We developed it with NASA Ames Research Center in San Francisco, Mountain View. We're going to land on the South Pole with Astrolab. And our camera will image the surface as the Astrolab rover is driving around. And we'll bring those images back and we'll look. And we'll use our measurements to correlate and get better understandings of where Helium-3 is. Now, we're not sure how much helium-3 is down at the South Pole, but this is an opportunity for us to do a very early mission. The next thing, and the hardware behind me, the lab that I'm in right now, is we're building up a payload that we want to fly to the moon in 2028. So it's about a 40-kilogram payload, and it's going to include a robotic arm, and it's going to include several devices. One device will sort regolith. One device will mechanically process the regolith. And one device will heat the regolith up to 950 degrees centigrade. And all three of those processes are going to release solar wind gases. So this mission will do two things for us. One is it'll demonstrate that we know how much helium-3 is in a certain landing area on the moon. And two, we'll demonstrate some of our core technology. sorting our mechanical processing and reduce risk for the eventual deployment of a robotic harvesters a fleet of robotic harvesters that will operate for many years processing the soil and extracting the helium Once we have that fleet of harvesters then we establish a head start Then we'll start to add technologies that will extract water and make propellants, extract metals, and start to service other markets in space as those markets begin to grow and take hold. I mean, one of the interesting things about your business is, you know, you're creating one piece of this whole space economy that many parts of which don't really exist yet, right? Like, completely getting to space, that exists. But the, like, going back and forth to the moon in an industrial way, like, other people are working on other pieces of that. But it's not a real thing yet. It's not an industry yet, right? And so talk me through like what other pieces do other people have to figure out for your business to work? So right now for we envision in the 2030s we'll have a rocket-based system that's bringing a small spacecraft back to Earth, reentering the Earth's atmosphere, just like Artemis II is going to do today. Yeah. But it's smaller with a payload, with not people. So it's a little different risk profile. And we'll be doing that four or five times a year. And we meaning not your company, but what? America? The world? We meaning Interloom. Like this is what we need to do. Okay. We might be able to buy that service in the future, but right now we're planning to build it. Okay. And it's a small system that'll carry 25 kilograms. so that's enough mass for a pressure bottle and say 3 to 5 kilograms of helium-3 which is a very, very valuable payload. Just so I can picture it, you've got this rocket coming back from the moon to deliver helium-3. How big is the... Do I picture a tank like a scuba diver wears? What am I even picturing? What do you put the helium-3 in? It would be roughly a sphere that's a little less than a meter in diameter. Okay. That's amazing. And you're going to the moon him back for that little ball of helium. And it's going to be worth $50 to $100 million. So, and you sell that into a market that's growing and really looking for it. So that's what we're counting on. We'll be back in just a minute. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. A lot of work advice sounds good in theory, but falls apart when you actually try to use it. I'm on a mission to change that. I'm Molly Graham, a company builder and the new host of Work Life, a podcast from TED. I've spent my career inside fast-growing companies, and one thing I know for sure is that work is messy. In this new season, I'm excited to share my conversations with founders, operators, and creatives about the real story behind their shiniest successes, the lessons that no one ever posts on LinkedIn. Listen now on Work Life wherever you get your podcasts. Who else is trying to do this? You know, our biggest competitor, I would say, is probably China. You know, the Chinese are talking about space resource extraction, including helium-3. They've published papers. They've already demonstrated over the last five, six years that they can bring samples back from the moon. And they can operate spacecraft 24-7 during the lunar night using nuclear batteries. The reason I bring up China is because 30, 40 years ago, we sort of made decisions in the U.S. that ceded the rare earth elements supply chain to China. And today, the processing of those rare earth elements, 90 plus percent of it is controlled by China. Right. The key thing about rare earth elements is they're not that rare, right? China is winning on rare earth elements because they have the industrial capacity, not because the elements are in the ground there and not elsewhere. Yep. And you see a lot of headlines that the U.S. government is investing billions of dollars in rebuilding the rare earth element supply chain in the U.S. Yeah. We, by focusing on helium-3 right now and making it a priority, I think we can avoid that mistake of the past that was made. And I think it's worth it. What you're doing is hard and you have to figure out a lot of things. When you think about what might go wrong or why it might not work, What do you think about? Well, I think five years ago, I would have thought, are my projections, are our projections about the future going to come true? You know, like we're dependent on many other companies. Yeah. We're dependent on NASA. So we've done our best to project things. And then you make sure, like in any other business, are there adjacencies where you can make some money along the path to your big vision? One of those is extracting helium-3 from terrestrial helium. So we're taking our cryogenic distillation technology, we're packaging it up, and we're plugging it into helium plants on Earth. The Air Force is backing that work, but we have investors that are really interested in that. Another thing is using our knowledge of excavation on the moon to apply to construction of a moon base. So NASA just announced a three-phase, $30 billion moon-based program, and we intend to be a part of it. And we want to demonstrate grading a surface, compacting a surface, digging a trench, building a berm remotely on the surface of the moon, which I think is going to, you think Artemis II is exciting. I think watching construction happen on the moon is going to be a pretty fascinating thing for people to watch and witness and witness a part of history. And we want to be a part of that. When do you think there will be a base on the moon? So NASA's administrator, Jared Isaacman, announced a new program to start increasing the number of flights to the moon, robotic flights to the moon, starting in 2027. he's described the early phases of a moon base as looking like a junkyard and i think that um i think it's appropriate to set expectations really low on what this is going to look like it's not going to look like your science fiction moon base it's going to look like a series of demonstrations some of them that work and some of them that don't and um he's using he's putting to work these companies that massa has enabled over the years that are building small cargo landers. And we'll be working with them. We'll be working with the companies building lunar rovers to put our tools for processing the lunar soil and moving the lunar soil. And we'll be a part of that. When I asked you a minute ago what you're worried about, I think you told me what you were worried about five years ago, but not what you're worried about now. Surely there's a lot to worry about, given your job, and the difficulty of what you're trying to do. Yeah, there's certainly a lot of technical risk, a lot of dependencies we have on other companies. The moon is an unforgiving place. It's extremely hot and cold. The lunar day lasts for two weeks and then the lunar night lasts for two weeks. There's radiation, there's hard vacuum, there's dust. It's very different from Earth. So we're going to learn a lot as we go. while we solve some of the big challenges around dust mitigation, heat rejection, operating in a vacuum, all those things. Just hard, just nuts and bolts, like literal nuts and bolts engineering challenges. Hard engineering, and we've got to raise money to go do all this. So, you know, we have to convince outside investors that this is the right thing to go spend their money on while they watching AI and defense tech are big areas where the venture capital frontier tech investors are focusing their time on And I think in the coming weeks months year we going to start to see a little more attention paid to space tech especially with the SpaceX IPO coming up It's an exciting time for us. So how do we make sure we're positioned right to take advantage of that? So you've been working in the space industry, in the space space for 35 years. Like this whole industry, such as it is now, has emerged since you started working in space, right? It's so different than when you started. What is surprising to you? Like when you look at the way the world is now, how is it different than you might have thought it would be? I told someone yesterday that when I started my career, I thought I'd missed the golden age. Yeah. You know, Apollo had happened and NASA was working on shuttle. Shuttle was routine. and then all of a sudden some things happen where, oh, you know, it's not so routine. We can't really, you know, take our eye off the ball here because this is still extremely risky and we don't have this, NASA doesn't have the support that we needed, that we had in the past. You mean the space shuttle blew up, just to be clear, not to be crass, but that's what you're referring to. Yes. I was in college. I had just, you know, done my first internship with NASA at that time. Yes. And the shuttle blew up and it's like, oh, it's so, the space industry is so hard. Like it's just people, you take, things take a long time. They take a lot of money. People persevere. It's a, it's not, it's just not an industry for the faint of heart. The work is hard. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of grinding. and so seeing that there's so many people working in it we've almost refreshed the entire space talent density space talent base over the last 10-15 years and I'm proud to have been a part of that building Blue Origin and in the next phase seeing seeing operating on the lunar surface as a real career path for young people coming out of college. That's the next thing that I'm really excited about being a part of. People graduate and say, I want to work on the moon. I want to build robots and systems that operate on the moon and build the next factories in space. I think that's a great thing to put on the resume. And so come talk to us. We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. A lot of work advice sounds good in theory, but falls apart when you actually try to use it. I'm on a mission to change that. I'm Molly Graham, a company builder and the new host of Work Life, a podcast from TED. I've spent my career inside fast-growing companies, and one thing I know for sure is that work is messy. In this new season, I'm excited to share my conversations with founders, operators, and creatives about the real story behind their shiniest successes, the lessons that no one ever posts on LinkedIn. Listen now on Work Life wherever you get your podcasts. Let's finish with a lightning round. What's one thing you learned working for Jeff Bezos? Oh gosh, keep your cool. Jeff is, yeah, you know, I've heard a lot of things. Why keep your cool? I love that answer. Jeff's wonderful. I really, really love working for Jeff. Yeah. He has, I just listened to another podcast. It was with Jeff Wilkie who ran Amazon Retail. And there was a time when he went to Jeff Bezos and said, you're coming up with so many ideas rapidly that it's hurting the company. And I want to qualify this by saying when I ran Blue Origin, we spent nine years below 200 people. So we were a very small company being, you know, led by me, but owned by Jeff who would come in and had new ideas all the time and, uh, fabulous ideas. I wanted to do all of them, but we just never, we were never at the scale to do it. Uh, but a lot of those, you know, it's, it's hard when you've got always got new ideas coming at you. It, it, it does really affect, um, you know, it, it does affect the pace. You think we'll find extraterrestrial life in your lifetime? I hope we still keep looking. And I hope we continue to look. And, you know, I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. But it's worth looking. Do you think you'll go to space? Me personally, probably, you know, the opportunity to go to space would have been on New Shepard. The Blue Origin. Yeah. Did you have that opportunity? Did you choose not to go? I did not have that opportunity. So, but I would say that that would have been the one opportunity where, you know, it's a vehicle that I was involved in building. I trust the team that designed and operated it, you know, 100%. And unfortunately, Blue decided to pause that program and they're not flying that anymore. Um, so I don't think my, you know, I'll have a chance to go to, go to space in my, my lifetime, but I think a lot of other people will. So, yeah. Um, what's the secret? What, what's one secret to running a barbecue restaurant? you've done your your uh your homework um so my grandfather and my dad both operated uh restaurants and barbecue restaurants in detroit uh i worked for my dad for three or four years through high school um you know the the amount of work involved uh in not just being an entrepreneur but owning a restaurant where you're serving people and your busiest day of year is on Super Bowl Sunday when you just want to be home watching the game. Those are, you know, the amount of work to go, you know, to go do that. And you're hiring high school kids like me who want to be somewhere else. I think those are, you know, some of the secrets I took away. Work? The secret is work all the time? Not a secret. Not a secret, but I picked up work ethic from my dad and my mom, too. And I think you need to do what we're doing here at Interloon. So it takes hard work. Thank you so much for your time. Good luck. Thank you. Thank you, Jacob. Rob Meyerson is the co-founder and CEO of Interloon. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang and edited by Lydia Jean Cott. Our engineer this week was Hans Dale Shi. We're always looking for ideas for who to talk to and what to cover on the show. You can email us at problem at pushkin.fm. You can find me on x at Jacob Goldstein. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Jacob Goldstein. Thank you very much for listening to the show. And we'll be back next week with another episode. A lot of work advice sounds good in theory, but falls apart when you actually try to use it. I'm on a mission to change that. I'm Molly Graham, a company builder and the new host of Worklife, a podcast from TED. I've spent my career inside fast growing companies. And one thing I know for sure is that work is messy. In this new season, I'm excited to share my conversations with founders, operators, and creatives about the real story behind their shiniest successes, the lessons that no one ever posts on LinkedIn. Listen now on Work Life wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.