Seattle-based Interlune is partnering with Vermeer on an excavating job that’s out of this world.
Space-mining company Interlune develops technology and equipment to mine natural resources on the moon to be used in commercial applications here on Earth. Vermeer, meanwhile, builds industrial-grade digging equipment for excavation at its headquarters in Pella.
While the two companies operate in two very different industries, they were connected by Vermeer CEO Jason Andringa’s aeronautics expertise.
Interlune plans to mine the moon for helium-3, a material that is rare on Earth but plentiful on the moon and used in advanced technology, such as the creation of quantum computing chips. To mine helium-3, the company will need excavating equipment built for outer space.
When Interlune CEO and co-founder Rob Meyerson, former president of Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company Blue Origin, was looking for an excavator manufacturer that understood the aerospace industry, he found Andringa and gave him a call.
“We looked at a lot of different companies that do industrial equipment design and development,” Meyerson said. “Vermeer’s expertise is in agriculture and mining, horizontal drilling, [they have] lots of different capabilities. They make excavators. I noticed that Jason Andringa, the CEO, is an aerospace engineer by training, and I reached out to him and asked if he wanted to talk more and learn more about what we’re doing.”
Meyerson said he was delighted when he heard Andringa was interested.
“We build these sort of bespoke, really elegant spacecraft that are extremely lightweight,” Meyerson said. “At Vermeer, they build industrial equipment. But the thing that we both have in common is innovation. We really want to innovate and find new ways to solve these problems. And Jason’s approach to this has always been that the moon is just another jobsite. We appreciate that way of thinking about it. Our engineering team and the Vermeer engineering team have developed a great relationship and are working very hard to develop this lunar excavator first, and we expect there’s going to be other things we’ll work on together in the future.”
Engineering expertise
The grandson of Vermeer founder Gary Vermeer, Andringa grew up watching his grandfather work and run the business. The elder Vermeer engineered and invented machinery to solve problems on the farm in Pella, including the mechanical wagon hoist in 1948 and the first large round hay baler in 1971. He was also a savvy businessperson, known for his ability to connect with customers.
“My grandfather was a naturally brilliant engineer and Vermeer started with innovation,” he said.
“My grandfather built an innovative product for his own use, and his neighbors saw it and said, ‘Hey, would you build one of those for me?’ and pretty soon my grandfather needed to hire somebody to keep up with the demand. Vermeer started with innovation. It started with research and development on my grandfather’s farm for his own use. I continue to believe that that is the No. 1 core competency.”
Andringa has a similar capability, blending technical expertise with a gift for connecting with others. A third-generation leader of the company, he is the son of Gary Vermeer’s daughter, Mary Andringa, who served as CEO for more than a decade and serves as chair emeritus for the company’s board of directors.
“I couldn’t be prouder to be the third generation CEO of the company that my grandfather founded, and also very proud that my mother was my immediate [predecessor] in the role of CEO,” he said. “It’s a pretty cool story to have a grandfather, mother, son, three-generation succession at a manufacturing company.”
Jason Andringa’s interest in engineering sparked when he spent a summer in Canada with his grandfather building a cabin. He earned a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Calvin University before going on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a master of science degree in aeronautics. His interest in aeronautics has led to positions at the Johnson Space Center and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Along the way, he made connections with several people in the aeronautics space, and now his work has come full circle as Vermeer partners with Interlune.
Andringa worked for four years for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and worked on the Curiosity Rover that’s now on Mars. His work also ended up on another current craft on Mars, the Perseverance Rover.
“Ever since I left, I have attempted to maintain my contacts in the aerospace world, because I knew at some point when there is a more concerted effort to build out infrastructure on the moon and Mars, that Vermeer can play a really important role in a number of different ways harvesting resources,” he said.
The project
Vermeer and Interlune are developing an excavator that can mine 100 metric tons of moon dirt per hour. The goal is to take the regolith, or moon dirt, ingest it and return it to the surface in one continuous motion, while harvesting helium-3.
The companies unveiled a prototype in May.
Mining on the moon presents more challenges than it does on Earth, partly because gravity on the moon is about one-sixth of what it is on Earth.
“Going to the moon, harvesting helium-3 and bringing it back to Earth seems like a pie in the sky [idea], but what we’re actually planning on doing on the surface of the moon is stuff we understand pretty well,” Andringa said. “The notion of the whole process seems far-fetched, but the individual steps are not far-fetched, and that’s what Interlune is trying to put together.”
Meyerson prefers to call the process “harvesting” rather than mining.
“We think it better represents how we’re thinking about this, that we’re excavating, we’re sorting the materials, we’re processing the material to extract and to liberate the gasses that are implanted in it, and then we have to separate those things out. Once we are done with the regolith, we want to put it back in a trench, so what we leave behind will look like a tilled field,” Meyerson said.
Next for Interlune, it plans on putting a multispectral camera unit it developed onto an Astrolab rover in July. The camera will produce images to detect titanium and regolith maturity. Interlune is incrementally working toward its own moon mission, where it can test and demonstrate its harvesting equipment and technology.
“What Interlune brings to the table is knowledge about the lunar regolith, the extreme environment on the moon, the cold temperatures, the vacuum, the radiation and environment, and what Vermeer brings is just a great expertise in industrial equipment design, mechanical engineering, facilities to prototype and take apart and put back together this equipment and test it.”
For Vermeer, Andringa foresees a sustained involvement in lunar work.
“I think over the next couple decades, there will be opportunities for Vermeer to play a role on both the moon and Mars, to harvest ice and also to provide infrastructure work to help level sites for landing pads, launch pads, habitats, greenhouses, potentially Institute resource utilization, 3D printing, rocket fuel manufacturing locations, installing infrastructure, underground [infrastructure], all of those things.”
He said the two companies have been working together for a few years on the project.
“It’s been really fun for the past couple of years to show how we can extend what we do around the world today to a new jobsite on the moon,” said Andringa, who has joined Interlune’s advisory board as part of the partnership.
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What is helium-3?
Helium-3, an isotope of helium, is created by the sun. It is rare on Earth but plentiful on the moon, where it arrives via solar winds. Helium-3 is a rare gas that can be used in numerous applications, including the potential creation of nuclear energy. Meyerson estimates that a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, of helium-3 would be worth $20 million. That price tag makes a space economy more plausible, he said.
“It’s priced at $20 million a kilogram, and at that price, it’s sort of the ideal first step to go to market to help to start a space economy,” Meyerson said.
While space mining might sound like science fiction, Meyerson pointed out that 10 years ago, there were no companies building lunar landers; now there are at least six.
“We think that is a sign of things to come, where there’s a future, where this infrastructure that we need to get to the surface of the moon, like landers and lunar rovers, are being built by others, and that allows us to focus on this big vision we have for harvesting space resources,” Meyerson said.
Another use for helium-3 is cooling quantum computer chips, which need to be near absolute zero to work. Helium-3 is also used in the creation of neutron detectors, which are used at ports to screen cargo and vehicles for nuclear materials.
The federal government identified a severe shortage of the isotope in 2010 and is supportive of the search and acquisition of more helium-3. Interlune received individual grants in 2024 from the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA TechFlights to advance proprietary separation and extraction technologies, respectively. In 2023, the company received a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Phase I award to develop technology to size and sort lunar regolith. Interlune has raised $18 million in funding to date and is planning several missions to the moon later this decade.
China is already visiting the moon and investigating the best spots to mine for helium-3, Meyerson said.
“The moon has trillions of dollars worth of natural resources. Interlune is interested, as a U.S. company, in going in, starting with helium-3, starting to access those resources. The Chinese are certainly going there. They’ve already been. They’ve already brought back samples and published technical papers on helium-3 on the moon. We think as long as there is a push from China to go to the moon and establish a base there, the U.S. and the West are going to continue to invest in lunar exploration.”
Vermeer R&D
With 600 engineers on staff, Vermeer is committed to continuous innovation in its machinery, Andringa said. At times, attaining innovation means experiencing failure.
“We do the vast majority of our research and development in house,” he said. “We are just constantly building new machines, testing prototypes, trying things. One of my grandfather’s most famous quotes is, ‘If 50% of what you try works, you’re not trying enough stuff.’ You should be comfortable [with the idea] that you should fail a lot. You should fail as often as you’re successful. I believe that’s the culture of the company today, to be willing to try stuff and be willing to fail, to learn from it.”
Innovation at Vermeer might be an entirely new machine, or it might be improvements to existing equipment.
“I always like to tell the engineers that I celebrate the continuous, sustaining innovation that we’re doing all the time just as much as the completely new and the different,” Andringa said. “The majority of our engineers are working to make our machines continuously better, improve the quality, improve the efficiency, improve the manufacturing capability.”
Leaders at Vermeer take steps to keep engineers feeling inspired.
“We’re very intentional within the different parts of the business to make sure that people have time to think about the new and the different in some parts of the business,” Andringa said. “We’ll set aside an entire week to only explore the new and the different and to make quick mock ups of the new and the different. We ask people to dedicate time each week to thinking about the new and the different. Also, we’re not just dependent on our 600 engineers; we’re enthusiastic about all 4,300 team members at Vermeer thinking about how things can be done differently. When the sales people are with our customers, they try to think through how we can make our customers’ jobs easier. We’ve got thousands of dealers that spend every day thinking about Vermeer equipment and spending time with their customers. Some of our most creative ideas have come from our dealers.”
Andringa said a Vermeer engineer came up with the idea for the ZR5-1200, which was named the Coolest Thing Made in Iowa in 2024 by an Iowa Association of Business and Industry poll. The machine is the world’s first self-propelled baler, allowing for autonomous hay baling.
“The original idea of the ZR5 came from one of our most creative engineers at Vermeer, who who has come up with all kinds of innovative, creative ideas, and yet, at the same time, the ZR5 is literally just combining a zero-turn mower and a round hay baler,” Andringa said. “We’ve been building round hay balers for more than 50 years now, and zero turn mowers have been around for a while, and as the story goes, this creative person was mowing his lawn on a zero-turn mower and thought, ‘Hey, maybe this would work for balers.’”
One of the secrets to Vermeer’s success is that its leaders look at the big picture instead of getting caught up in the performance of a single fiscal quarter, Andringa said.
“I think that’s one of the biggest advantages of being a family-held, privately held business, is the opportunity to be long-term oriented,” he said. “I care a lot more about what Vermeer looks like 10 years from now than I do one month from now or one quarter from now … and just knowing that my family is with me, the descendants of my grandfather and the descendants of his brother that continue to be the shareholders of Vermeer to this day and are passionate about Vermeer, I have the confidence that they also care more about what Vermeer looks like 10 years from now than what it looks like a month from now or a quarter from now. My advice for those people and those companies that have the freedom to do it, take the long view as often as possible. Think about your decisions through the lens of ‘Does this make us a stronger company 10 years from now or a weaker company 10 years from now?’”