Interlune

Gary Lai is an American aerospace engineer who graduated from Cornell University in 1995 with a degree in applied economics and business management, then earned a degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from the University of Washington in 1999. He joined Blue Origin in 2004 as one of its first 20 employees and became the chief architect of New Shepard, holding roles including senior director of design engineering, crew capsule element lead, and pathfinding lead for advanced R&D; he flew to space aboard New Shepard's NS-20 mission in 2022. He co-founded Interlune in 2020 and serves as CTO, leading the engineering of its lunar helium-3 excavation and processing technology.

Harrison 'Jack' Schmitt is a geologist, former NASA astronaut, and former US senator from New Mexico, and the only professional scientist to have walked on the Moon, as the lunar module pilot of Apollo 17 in December 1972. He earned a PhD in geology from Harvard University in 1964 after studying at Caltech and the University of Oslo as a Fulbright scholar, and worked for the US Geological Survey's astrogeology branch before joining NASA. A longtime advocate for harvesting lunar helium-3, he proposed the 'Interlune-InterMars Initiative' in 1997, and serves as a co-founder and executive chairman of Interlune, lending decades of lunar-resource expertise to the company.