There is an isotope called helium-3 that could cool new quantum computers. It's rare on Earth, but plentiful on the moon. At a market price of $20 million a kilo, it might make economic sense to harvest the stuff from up there.

This week on “Marketplace Morning Report,” we’re hearing from multiple views on an emerging moon economy, how it might work, and whether it's even a good idea.

Gary Calnan, the co-founder and CEO of CisLunar, recently joined Marketplace’s David Brancaccio for a conversation. CisLunar is one of the companies working on recycling space refuse into useful stuff and making units that could help power the lunar economy. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: You hear about building railroads on the moon, maybe to pick up stuff that gets mined on the moon. Your company is doing some thinking about, well, once you mined it, what useful things might it be turned into?

Gary Calnan: That's right. So when we look at the economy, thinking about how can we be on the edge of human expansion into space, there was a gap for taking those resources and turning them into something manufacturers could use. Somebody needs to be the steel mills in the lunar economy and in the space economy in general.

Brancaccio: You're also in the recycling business. Tell me about that.

Calnan: We realized early on that there's a lot of spacecraft out there, a lot of space debris. So why don't we go after this space debris as a first feedstock to learn how to do this? And then later on, as we were studying the lunar economy with DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and some other companies, we learned that, hey, if we use recycled landers and other metals that we bring that are already refined, we actually really enhance the efficiency of the process of even taking virgin materials and turning them into something we can use for manufacturing.

Brancaccio: Yeah, because in orbit, there's a lot of junk floating around. Some of it looks just like a spent satellite; some of it are little annoying bits that can be dangerous. You see that as a possible resource.

Calnan: Eventually, yeah. We've done a study early on about how do we turn space debris into metal propellant — fuel for an electric propulsion system. And so you combine that with our power capability and our furnace capability to manufacture the fuel, and you could turn space debris into delta-v, as they call it in the industry, which is how you get around in space.

Brancaccio: I mean, it's got to be a challenge for a company, right? Because some of the stuff won't actually work for a while, and then when's it going to make a profit for somebody? You have to stay alive in the medium term. Now, that could be grants, but along the way, you've developed technology that might have a more immediate practical effect that people might want to buy now?

Calnan: Yeah, absolutely. So, the grants are essential, the SBIR program [is] critical for our company to get to where we are. But one of those programs, we learned that the power system we had built for processing metal was something we could use for the entire space industry. When you actually transmit information, or you do sensing, or you run an electric thruster, or really, anything else on a satellite, you need electricity. And every time we make power, we have to process it, transform it so that it can do whatever job it's going to do. We make the box that does that processing from the source, you know, we get that energy coming in, and we turn it into the energy coming out that you need to do whatever the job is you want to do.

Brancaccio: There isn't a lunar economy yet, isn't that fair to say? I mean, it's not like there's an active economy on the moon yet.

Calnan: Not yet, but it is right around the corner. I mean, there's a lot of investment going into it. There's a real urgency around government making sure that we have a position on the moon for geopolitical reasons. And what's coming next is taking it from every mission, brings all the things with it to an idea where we have a diverse lunar economy, where you get there and then you tap into the services that are available, just like you do on Earth. You buy your utilities, and you have your trash service, and you buy your resources, or whatever the things are that different specialist companies provide, and that'll be where it gets when we get to a real lunar economy.

Correction (Dec. 3, 2025): A previous version of this story misspelled Gary Calnan’s name.