In the silent vacuum of space, five autonomous robots churn through the lunar surface, digging up a loose layer of rock and dust and leaving rows of uniform tracks in their wake.

Stopping only to recharge at a central solar power station, the car-sized machines process the lunar dirt internally to extract a type of helium so rare on Earth that a palm-sized container is estimated to be worth millions. Once processed, the precious resource is loaded into a launcher and ejected back to Earth.

The vision is one born of science fiction, but there are several companies already raising money to mine Earth’s neighbour for resources, in a race to be first to benefit from the nascent lunar economy.

“My view is that it’s not a question of if, it’s a matter of when,” says Rob Meyerson, who founded a Seattle-based company Interlune, one of several of the 21st-century lunar prospectors.

Meyerson worked on the space shuttle programme but left Nasa to help Jeff Bezos turn his space company, Blue Origin, from a small experiment into a major aerospace player. His next ambition, however, is roughly 385,000km away, and he has raised $18m from investors.

Rob Meyerson. Photograph: Oliver Holmes/Perch Partners

The moon has resources that are in extremely short supply, and Meyerson is focused on Helium-3, a gas made in the sun and only present in trace amounts on Earth. Deposited on the moon’s surface over billions of years by the solar wind, it is used in medical imaging but it has qualities that could become vital in quantum computers and, theoretically, nuclear fusion.

While the demand for Helium-3 is growing, Meyerson says, the available supply is extremely limited. “It’s a product that is priced high enough to warrant going to space and bringing it back to Earth,” he says.

After 50 years with not a single human visitor, the moon is back in vogue, with Nasa leading an astronaut fly-by mission this week. The Artemis trip is the first to send astronauts back since 1972 and is part of a series of missions that the US space agency envisions will result in a permanent human presence, including a lunar base. China, meanwhile, is on target for a crewed lunar landing this decade.

And with private companies rather than governments increasingly operating in the satellite business, deep space exploration is having a renaissance, bringing a fresh energy not seen since the days of the Apollo programme.

A commercial operation to mine the moon would not have been feasible a decade ago, but the explosive growth of private access to space through companies such Blue Origin or its competitor SpaceX has made off-Earth business increasingly possible.

Multiple international missions are expected to touch down on the moon in the next few years, and Interlune is not the only company investigating Helium-3. ispace, a Japan-headquartered robotic spacecraft firm, has partnered with another US-based start-up called Magna Petra, which says it is developing an “AI-based” and “non-destructive, energy-efficient recovery of Helium-3 from lunar regolith”.

“We’re betting that the cost of access to the moon will come down,” says Meyerson.

He partnered with 90-year-old former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who serves as executive chair. The only geologist to walk on the moon, as part of the last crewed US mission, 1972’s Apollo 17, Schmitt has advocated for lunar helium mining since the 1980s.

Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the centre for space resources at the Colorado School of Mines, says that key to the feasibility of extracting Helium-3 mining will be whether the lunar regolith has a high enough concentration of the element.

The professor gives the “gold in the ocean” metaphor – the sea is filled with millions of tonnes of tiny specks of gold floating around but no company is trying to extract it. Why? “It’s in extremely low concentrations, so the cost to extract it doesn’t even compare even with the price of gold,” said Abbud-Madrid.

That is why Interlune is sending a multispectral camera to the lunar south pole on a probe later this year, to assess not just the quantities but the concentrations of Helium-3.

‘Object of adoration’

But this fresh pioneering spirit around extracting resources from the moon is raising questions about whether it is ethically the right thing to do. Critics argue that history is full of pioneers who rushed into unknown frontiers, only to realise too late that they had caused irreparable damage to environments they did not fully understand.

Abbud-Madrid says that when he first started studying mining in space for 25 years ago there was mostly excitement, but now there are increasingly questions of the environmental impact.

“The moon has been an object of adoration for millennia. Every civilisation has looked at the moon as a place with philosophical and religious connotations,” he said. “You can go to an asteroid and destroy it, do whatever you want – it’s just one out of millions. But the moon, you see it every night … Is it OK? That’s a very valid question that has been asked lately, and one that has to be addressed at some point.”

Interlune does not use the word mining, which has destructive connotations, but instead says it envisions “harvesting”, which it says “will unlock unprecedented growth and innovation for the betterment of Earth and humankind”.

The wording is deliberate amid growing concern that humankind could destroy a pristine environment. Astronomers have also warned that mining operations would affect the future prospect of performing important science from the lunar surface, which is extremely cold and isolated, so therefore seen as a prime location for sensitive equipment.

Scientists have called for the protection of certain areas, known as sites of extraordinary scientific importance, including areas on the poles and the radio-quiet farside, which could be ideal for deep space observation.

“We’re not asking to put half the moon or some huge area off limits to commercial or exploration activities,” said Martin Elvis, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. “We’re just asking for a few small spots on the moon.”

Speaking at an astronautical congress last year, he warned that “rare valuable real estate is known to be a great cause of disputes and conflicts” and there was an urgent and unanswered question about how these sites are properly protected.

High among these concerns are the opaque legal aspect of moon mining – a 1967 Outer Space Treaty is clear that no country can claim ownership of a celestial body such as the moon, but it makes no reference to commercial activities.

Meyerson says there is space for businesses and scientists in the lunar age. “The moon is big,” he says, but he adds that their team want to operate “thoughtfully in a way that leaves the site to be used again in the future”.

But Interlune is just one player in a global race to establish a presence on the moon. China’s Chang’e-6 mission successfully brought back samples from the far side of the moon in 2024 that included Helium-3. State media reported data from the mission would help Beijing estimate the total amount of Helium-3 on the moon, which it described as an “energy source in the future”.

Over the next decades, the moon is expected to become a microcosm of power struggles here on Earth, with major world powers – Russia, the US, and China – all having ambitious plans to return space probes and humans to the moon.

“We’re watching very closely countries that maybe don’t think the same way that we do, like China, who are operating very, very energetically,” says Meyerson. “I think it’s important that the west and the US have a presence on the moon.”