The Regolith Industry

How to extract value from dull, grey rocks

With the restructuring of the Artemis program, away from operations in lunar orbit and towards more direct missions to the lunar surface, the focus of NASA human spaceflight has also moved to what exactly will be done on the surface. Something that they are especially interested in is in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU).

After last months Ignition event, NASA released a book containing a loose road map for the technologies and capabilities they believe need to be developed by industry in order to realise the vision of a permanent lunar base.

The document follows with NASAs three phase plan for the Moon; and in phase three that includes using the lunar regolith, which is what I’m going to be talking about here. Industry has not had much time yet to respond to the NASA pivot; but many companies have already been working on various schemes for some time, and I’ll discuss those here.

I’m discussing both privately held and publicly traded companies here, and nothing here should be taken as investment advice. The information below is purely for educational purposes.

Glass Domes

I have written about Skyeports before - they have a novel concept to blow glass made from lunar regolith into very large structures. They have been receiving funds from NASA since I last mentioned them to develop this technology, and have produced some demonstrators on Earth with simulated lunar regolith, including a blowing inside a vacuum chamber.