Helios Project

**Product and the concrete problem it solves.** Helios Project attacks two of the hardest resource problems in the industrial economy with a single physics idea. On Earth, primary iron- and steelmaking is the single largest industrial source of CO2 — roughly 7-8% of global emissions — because the blast-furnace route burns metallurgical coke to chemically strip oxygen out of iron ore. Off Earth, any sustained lunar or cislunar presence is bottlenecked by the cost of lifting oxygen (for life support and, more importantly, rocket propellant) and structural metal out of a deep gravity well. Helios' answer to both is the **Helios Cycle™**, a sodium-mediated thermochemical process that reduces iron ore to metallic iron using "mostly thermal energy, while emitting only oxygen" — no coking coal, no direct CO2. The same core reaction that yields green iron on Earth is the same reaction Helios proposes to run on lunar regolith to liberate high-purity oxygen and metal in situ. The concrete value proposition is therefore unusually legible: a coal-free, lower-energy, lower-cost route to a commodity (iron) that underpins civilization, with a directly adjacent capability to manufacture the most strategically important consumable in space.

**Core technology and how it actually works.** Conventional decarbonization bets — hydrogen direct reduction, molten-oxide electrolysis — either demand vast quantities of green hydrogen or run at extreme electrolytic conditions. Helios instead uses sodium as a chemical reducing agent inside a regenerable thermal cycle: sodium pulls oxygen off iron oxide to produce metallic iron, the sodium is recovered and reused, and oxygen is the only effluent. The company states the process requires significantly less energy than incumbent routes and projects operating costs roughly **30% lower** than today's polluting technologies, tolerating even low-grade ores. For the lunar variant, Helios engineered a reactor that **spatially separates the oxygen-creation zone from the regolith melt zone**, allowing it to extract oxygen at above 99.6% purity directly from regolith — of which oxygen is ~42% by weight — without any consumables shipped from Earth, leaving deoxygenated regolith and metals as usable byproducts. Critically, the underlying chemistry is presented as extensible beyond iron to other elements the company names — silicon, copper, and lithium — which is what turns a green-steel story into a broader strategic-materials platform.

**Market, customers, and go-to-market.** Helios is pursuing a phased, partnership-led commercialization. Its stated roadmap targets a **pilot plant in 2026** and **commercial units around 2028**, with a first lunar mission also expected around 2028. On the terrestrial side, the beachhead is green iron/steel: in September 2024 Helios signed a Memorandum of Understanding with **BlueScopeX**, the venture arm of Australian steel major BlueScope Steel, to trial its green iron, and Helios has been recognized as a technology-innovator member of the **World Steel Association** — a meaningful signal of incumbent-industry engagement rather than pure lab work. The company frames a very large prize, asserting the approach could ultimately save the steel industry on the order of $200 billion by displacing coke-based reduction. On the space side, the go-to-market is government and prime-contractor driven, anchored by its DARPA selection (below) and Israeli space-agency support. The obvious diligence caveat: as of mid-2026 this is a pre-commercial, pilot-stage company; the MOUs and program selections are validation, not yet volume revenue.

**Traction, funding, and third-party validation.** The strongest external validation is unusual for a metallurgy startup: in DARPA's **LunA-10 (10-Year Lunar Architecture)** study, Helios was one of just 14 organizations selected — and reportedly the only Israeli/international participant — tasked with mining and in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) to turn lunar regolith into oxygen and metals, work documented in DARPA's own published LunA-10 materials. That places Helios in a cohort alongside names like Sierra Space, Nokia, Northrop Grumman, and Blue Origin. On funding, public databases report Helios has raised on the order of **$18-20 million across roughly five rounds**, including a ~$6M seed in May 2022 co-led by **Doral Energy-Tech Ventures** and **At One Ventures**, with additional backing reported from strategic and grant sources including mining major **Anglo American**, **Tech Energy Ventures**, and Israeli government agencies (the Israeli Space Agency and Ministry of Energy); exact totals vary modestly by source and should be confirmed directly. The company is early-growth by headcount, reported at roughly 41 employees.

**Founders and team background.** Helios was founded in July 2018 by **Jonathan Geifman** (CEO) together with co-founders including **Linoam Eliad** (now CTO), and, per public records, John Hausner, Naomi Levy, and Elad Geffen. The current leadership bench is science-heavy: alongside Geifman and Eliad (PhD), the company lists **Bat-Chen Herchkovich Ben Simon** as Chief Business Officer/COO, **Hani Farran (PhD)** as VP R&D, and **Yosef Gofer (PhD)** — an established electrochemistry researcher — as Chief Scientist. The team's origin as a space-tech venture that pivoted its lunar-oxygen chemistry into terrestrial green metallurgy is itself a credibility marker: it shows the reduction chemistry generalizes across radically different feedstocks and environments. The principal team gap is the classic hard-tech one — deep scientific talent must still prove it can scale a bench/pilot process into reliable, financeable industrial plants and, separately, qualify hardware for spaceflight.

**Competitive dynamics.** Helios sits at the intersection of two competitive arenas. (1) In **green ironmaking**, it competes with well-capitalized decarbonization approaches: Boston Metal (molten-oxide electrolysis), Electra (low-temperature electrochemical iron), and hydrogen-DRI players such as Sweden's Stegra (formerly H2 Green Steel), plus the entrenched blast-furnace/DRI incumbents (ArcelorMittal and peers) whose scale and cost are the benchmark to beat. Helios' claimed edges are avoiding both the massive green-hydrogen dependency and the extreme electrolytic conditions of rivals while tolerating low-grade ore. (2) In **lunar ISRU**, it competes with the other LunA-10 oxygen/ISRU performers such as Sierra Space and adjacent efforts like Blue Origin's "Blue Alchemist" regolith work. Its differentiator there is a single, consumable-free chemistry that yields both high-purity oxygen and structural metal. The strategic risk is focus: running a terrestrial industrial-scale-up and a spaceflight-qualification program in parallel is ambitious for a ~40-person company.

**Defense, security, and resilience dual-use relevance.** Helios' dual-use case is real but is best framed as strategic-resilience and space-security adjacency rather than a fielded weapons capability. First, **critical-materials sovereignty**: a coal-free, electrifiable process to produce iron and, prospectively, silicon, copper, and lithium from low-grade ore is directly relevant to reducing allied dependence on adversary-dominated metal refining and to hardening the defense-industrial base's materials supply chain. Second, **cislunar and space security**: DARPA — a defense R&D agency — selected Helios specifically for ISRU that turns regolith into oxygen (propellant and life support) and metals (landing pads, habitats, structures), foundational infrastructure for sustained national-security operations in the increasingly contested cislunar domain. Third, **energy resilience**: displacing coke with a lower-energy thermal cycle contributes to industrial decarbonization and energy-security goals. The honest calibration is that these are enabling and infrastructure roles; Helios is not a defense-products company, and its security value is realized only if the technology reaches industrial and flight maturity.

**Growth stage, trajectory, and key diligence risks.** Helios is an early-stage, capital-intensive hard-tech venture with an unusually strong validation signal (DARPA, BlueScope, World Steel) but an unproven scale-up. The bull case: a genuinely novel, coal-free reduction chemistry that generalizes from steel to critical metals to lunar oxygen, backed by a defense agency and a steel major, addressing enormous markets. The bear case should dominate diligence: (1) **scale-up risk** — bench/pilot thermochemical processes routinely stumble on energy balance, materials handling, and unit economics at industrial scale; (2) **capital intensity and timeline** — first commercial units are targeted for ~2028, implying years of financing before revenue in a sector where heavy-industry buyers move slowly; (3) **dual-program focus** — terrestrial plants and spaceflight qualification compete for a small team's attention and capital; (4) **funding opacity** — reported totals (~$18-20M) are modest for the ambition and vary by source; (5) **competition** from better-funded green-steel rivals; and (6) **commercial conversion** — MOUs (BlueScope) and study selections (LunA-10) are not binding offtake. Progression past "early" would require a functioning pilot plant hitting its cost/energy claims, a binding commercial offtake or joint-development deal, and demonstrated flight-relevant hardware.