The next quantum revolution may require a helium ‘gold rush’ on the moon

May 14, 2026

7 min read

Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm

The next quantum revolution may require a helium ‘gold rush’ on the moon

The rare isotope helium-3 is one of Earth’s most precious commodities—so precious, in fact, that it might prove profitable to mine from the moon

By Robin George Andrews edited by Lee Billings

This artist’s concept shows a speculative view of a crewed helium-3 mining operation on the moon.

quantic69/Getty Images

Since time immemorial, humans gazing up at the moon have asked grand questions. Where did it come from? Why does it wax and wane? Is it made of cheese?

We now have responses to most of these (“a giant impact,” “orbital phases” and “no, sadly,” respectively). But as an international 21st-century lunar race intensifies, one pragmatic query remains: How can you make money on the moon?

The answer, according to several scientists and entrepreneurs, is a resource that’s vanishingly rare on Earth yet may exist in lunar abundance: helium-3.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Helium-3 is spectacularly useful, and demand for it is soaring. A superlative coolant, helium-3 enables quantum computers to reach their operating temperatures, fractions of a degree above absolute zero. The precious substance is also vital for advanced medical imaging, as well as sniffing out smuggled nuclear material, and holds promise as a clean fuel for future fusion reactors. On terra firma, most of the available supply of helium-3 comes as a by-product of nuclear weaponry via the radioactive decay of tritium, a rare isotope of hydrogen that boosts the power of thermonuclear bombs. This process makes just a few kilograms of helium-3 per year worldwide, and a single kilogram currently costs about $20 million.

But scientists estimate that somewhere on the order of a billion kilograms of helium-3 are lacquered onto the lunar surface. So the moon-based mining of helium-3 could, it seems, someday become a multitrillion-dollar industry.

All this sets helium-3 apart from another much ballyhooed lunar resource: water ice, found in some of the moon’s deepest, darkest craters. Those reservoirs could hydrate crops and astronauts alike on any crewed moon base, and water split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen can manufacture rocket fuel. But lunar water has little use on Earth. So “helium-3 is where the money is,” says Clive Neal, a lunar geoscientist at the University of Notre Dame.

That’s assuming there’s actually enough of it accessible on the moon to be profitably extracted. “Once you’ve proven you can do it, then you have to scale it, which has its own challenges,” says Paul van Susante, principal investigator of the Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab at Michigan Technological University.

Building a Treasure Map

Helium-3 is an isotope of helium that possesses one fewer neutron than its run-of-the-mill counterpart, helium-4, which is the only other stable helium isotope. Earth has both varieties. Helium-4 is naturally produced in the mantle through the decay of uranium and thorium, so there’s a lot of it. Most of the natural supply of helium-3 formed in the first few minutes after the big bang, and Earth’s stores were laid down billions of years ago, when our planet formed. The rare isotope is mostly locked away deep within our world’s innards, but vanishingly small quantities are belched out in volcanic eruptions and through natural gas pipelines.

Researchers realized the moon was a potential helium-3 treasure trove in the 1970s, after finding it in drill cores gathered by astronauts during some of NASA’s Apollo missions. China’s robotic sample-return program, the Chang’e series, has found it as well on the moon’s near side and far side. Only meager traces of lunar helium-3 are present in these samples, yet these amounts still far exceed Earth’s abundance.

“The moon has an extra source of helium, which is the sun,” says Sara Russell, a planetary scientist at London’s Natural History Museum. The solar wind—the stream of charged particles emanating from the sun’s atmosphere—carries various chemical species, including helium-3, out into space. “Earth is shielded from this solar wind because of our lovely atmosphere and magnetic field. The airless moon doesn’t have this shield, so helium-3 gets spray-painted across the whole of the lunar surface.”

Helium-3 isn’t guaranteed to stick around on anything it strikes, but we’ve lucked out by having a moon that is relatively rich with ilmenite—a mineral made of iron,