In Ad Astra, the 2019 Brad Pitt film, the Moon is shown as a place of highways, checkpoints, and corporate outposts – a frontier already carved up by commerce and conflict. That scene felt like science fiction, yet it is fast becoming reality. In anyone’s estimation, $300 million is a lot of money. Especially when it’s being spent on a gas from the Moon.
But this is no joke. The Washington Post revealed this month that Finnish firm Bluefors and American company Interlune have struck an agreement worth hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase tens of thousands of litres of lunar Helium-3. This is not just a commercial milestone – it is a political act that foreshadows how lunar governance may evolve.
Long before the first kilogram of lunar soil is heated, contracts are shaping ownership, pricing, and access to celestial resources. This early monetisation of the Moon highlights a growing clash between private profit and the principle of outer space as the “province of all mankind”. The key question is whether pre-market contracts will create a de facto regime of lunar commerce that outpaces treaties, reshaping global equity in the quantum era.
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits claims of sovereignty and declares that spacquantue shall be “the province of all mankind”.
The Bluefors–Interlune deal is the largest private purchase of a natural resource from space, locking in up to 10,000 litres of Helium-3 annually for delivery between 2028 and 2037. At current valuations of roughly $20 million per kilogram – about $2,600 per litre – this is an order worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Bluefors, a leading supplier of dilution refrigerators for quantum computing, depends on Helium-3 to cool qubits to near absolute zero. A single million-qubit data centre of the type that will propel the AI revolution may consume thousands of litres annually. If scaled to millions of qubits, quantum computers would not only solve complex scientific and economic problems, they could also propel the artificial intelligence age. It would vastly accelerate the power and reach of algorithms.
Earth’s production of Helium-3, derived mostly from tritium decay in nuclear stockpiles, is capped at 22,000–30,000 litres per year. With demand from quantum computing projected to surge, Interlune estimates that lunar reserves exceed one million metric tonnes, accumulated over four billion years of solar wind bombardment. Whether those reserves are technically recoverable is disputed – the US Geological Survey in 2022 classified them as “inferred unrecoverable” – but contracts are already treating them as viable commodities.
The creation of these contracts does more than allocate risk between buyer and seller. It establishes a pricing benchmark, demonstrates enforceable title transfer, and signals to insurers and investors that lunar resources can be securitised. In effect, a paper market emerges before mining begins. This mirrors terrestrial precedents: LNG cargoes are routinely traded through long-term offtake agreements, and cobalt supplies are pre-financed through contracts years ahead of delivery.
What makes lunar Helium-3 distinctive is that there is no mature international regulatory framework. Once courts recognise and enforce these contracts, private law will function as proto-governance, sidelining the deliberations of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
This is where the gap between law and practice becomes stark. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits claims of sovereignty and declares that space shall be “the province of all mankind”. Yet it says little about ownership of extracted resources. The US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015 filled that gap domestically, granting American companies the right to own and sell resources mined from celestial bodies. The Artemis Accords of 2020 advanced this further by recognising “safety zones” around operations, which supporters call necessary for deconfliction but critics see as de facto territorial carve-outs. For countries outside the Artemis framework – including China, Russia, India, and much of the Global South – these unilateral moves are a direct erosion of the common heritage principle.
The deeper problem is that once demand is created, it generates its own ecosystem. Bluefors’s purchase will not remain an isolated case. Maybell Quantum, another commercial player, has signed agreements for thousands of litres of lunar Helium-3. The US Department of Energy’s Isotope Program has even bought a token three litres, marking the first government purchase of a natural resource from space. Each contract sends a signal that lunar mining is bankable. As more firms invest, more capital flows into technologies, logistics, and transportation. An expanding business interest builds momentum for exploiting lunar resources, regardless of whether global governance keeps pace. This is the classic feedback loop of demand creation: once markets exist on paper, they mobilise capital and pressure governments to accommodate reality.
Whoever controls the supply chain of Helium-3 could shape the trajectory of encryption, financial modelling, drug discovery, and even military command systems.
For quantum computing, the stakes are particularly acute. Scaling these machines to commercial levels requires millions of qubits, which in turn demand cooling to temperatures near 7 millikelvins – 200 times colder than outer space itself. Helium-3 is indispensable to that process. Existing supplies are insufficient for a world where multiple data centres operate quantum computers.
The implication is stark: “they will need more Helium-3 than is available on planet Earth,” as Interlune’s chief technology officer bluntly stated. Lunar mining thus becomes not a futuristic curiosity, but a potential bottleneck for information supremacy. Whoever controls the supply chain of Helium-3 could shape the trajectory of encryption, financial modelling, drug discovery, and even military command systems.
But profit-driven contracts sit uneasily with the normative architecture of outer space. The common heritage principle was designed to prevent enclosure of the Moon and to ensure equitable benefit-sharing. If companies like Interlune can secure hundreds of millions in contracts, then the benefits accrue to private actors, while the risks and externalities remain undefined. Developing countries already express concern that lunar mining will replicate the extractive inequalities on Earth. For them, the Moon risks becoming the site of a new “resource colonialism,” where access to Helium-3 underwrites quantum advantage for a few, while the majority are priced out of the revolution.
What would equitable governance look like? One option is a “Lunar Resources Compact” requiring firms to contribute a small royalty from each kilogram sold into a global commons fund, supporting scientific access and capacity building. Another is to create quotas for non-commercial research, ensuring that universities and emerging states have access to critical materials. A third approach would mandate transparency in safety zones and environmental impact assessments, preventing disguised territorial claims or unchecked ecological harm to the lunar surface. These mechanisms would not erase the profit motive, but they could temper it with obligations consistent with the Outer Space Treaty’s spirit.
By the time feasibility is proven, the governance regime may already have been set by the logic of private law and corporate finance.
It can be argued that such frameworks are premature, since Helium-3 remains technically challenging to extract. Mining it may require moving billions of tons of regolith to obtain useful volumes. Interlune’s excavator prototype, capable of handling 100 tonnes per hour, is impressive but untested on the lunar surface. The economics of retrieval, transport, and separation remain speculative. Yet dismissing the issue until mining begins ignores the way markets work. Demand and contracts create realities on Earth long before regolith is lifted on the Moon. By the time feasibility is proven, the governance regime may already have been set by the logic of private law and corporate finance.
The Bluefors–Interlune contract is therefore a warning shot. It demonstrates that lunar governance will not be decided in slow UN negotiations alone, but in the brisk language of offtake agreements and delivery schedules. The profit motive and the commons principle are colliding in real time.
The choice facing the international community is not whether lunar mining will happen, but whether it will unfold under an exclusionary regime of first movers, or a compact that balances private initiative with shared benefit. If left unchecked, pre-market contracts will tilt the balance decisively toward profit, leaving common heritage as little more than rhetoric. If managed wisely, however, they could become the foundation of a fair and resilient lunar economy that supports both technological progress and global equity.
