Before you send a billion-dollar machine to the Moon, you need to know it'll survive Moon dirt — so we make the next best thing.

Plus his take on what the Asia-Pacific is actually doing in this race.

"This man is solving one of the biggest engineering problems standing between humanity and a sustained presence on the Moon." That's what I posted to LinkedIn this week. You ready for an inspirational story?

(We have a video interview here for visual learners.)

The arc

Nick's CV reads: Farm kid. Cotton chipper. 17 years in oil and gas. PhD. Founder.

Not the wunderkind story. Not the dropped-out-of-Stanford story. Even better. The one almost nobody writes about — the founder who showed up to space with somebody else's industry already on the clock.

In his own words: "I've always wanted to build cities in space. I did move into the oil and gas sector for 17 years and then in 2019 I moved back into the space sector doing a PhD, starting the business."

Nick and Andrew built two such companies — producing lunar regolith simulants and mapping the Moon in extraordinary detail.

The digital twin — Interstellar Mapping

Who decides where every lunar mission actually lands?

Right now — only a small number of organisations have the expertise and tools to do it well. The Moon has been extensively mapped, but transforming that data into mission-ready intelligence for infrastructure, operations and resource development remains a significant challenge. Decide wrong on where to put your habitat, your solar array, or your first rover route, and you lose the mission. Decide wrong on where to drill, and you lose the resource bet. There's no trial-and-error tier on the Moon. You pick once. It either works or it doesn't. You lose millions or you don't.

That's the question Interstellar Mapping was built to answer. The company describes its job in twelve words: "The Moon is not empty space. It holds resources, routes, and risks. We map all three."

The product is lunar geospatial intelligence. Four services:

• Infrastructure site selection — where to put a habitat, solar array, comms station, or fuel depot.
• Hazard avoidance — boulders, craters, slopes, and terrain hazards.
• Rover routing — given the hazard map, the path that gets your rover from A to B without dying.
• Resource location — water ice, rare minerals, volatile deposits. Map first, commit second.

Who pays for this? Commercial lunar operators and national space agencies — the people about to spend nine figures on hardware they only get to land once.

As far as I can find, Interstellar Mapping is one of the very few companies in the Asia-Pacific focused exclusively on commercial lunar geospatial intelligence. This is the digital twin of the Moon, scoped to your mission.

The physical twin — Interstellar Innovation

Map all you want. The Moon, when you get there, is a physical environment. And the most detrimental part — the one nobody talks about enough — is the dust.

Apollo astronauts came back with stories. Lunar regolith is sharp, electrostatically charged, abrasive at a molecular level. It stuck to spacesuits. Eroded seals. Clogged equipment. Got into Aldrin's eyes and Schmitt's lungs. Every serious lunar programme since has had to test against a physical analogue before launch.

That's a regolith simulant. Interstellar Innovation (Australia) makes one. The product is IFLRS-75 — particles under 75 microns, targeting the part Apollo identified as the operational nightmare.

The numbers that matter:

• Median particle size: 21.26 µm
• Specific surface area: 1,069 m²/kg
• Basaltic mineralogy designed to replicate key characteristics of lunar regolith for testing and development

Pricing tells you the buyer:

• Research (under 1,000 kg): USD 16/kg
• Bulk (over 1 tonne): USD 6/kg
• Mission-scale (over 10 tonnes): USD 2/kg

That mission-scale tier is the giveaway. If you're paying $2/kg by the multi-tonne, you're doing full-system hardware qualification. That's the layer.

Why two companies, not one

Map (digital twin) tells you where. Simulant (physical twin) lets you test. You need both. Map without simulant tells you where to land hardware never validated against lunar dust. Simulant without map lets you test against the Moon in general — not the specific patch you're going to. And obviously, data is king.

Together, the two companies do what every serious lunar mission needs: test technologies, assess resources, prepare for what the Moon actually throws at the hardware. It's the kind of work that happens long before the rocket launches — and the kind almost no one writes about.

Few companies combine both lunar intelligence products and physical lunar test materials under the same leadership team.

What's Nick's take on the lunar mission in the Asia-Pacific?

Short version:

• China is moving fastest. Their crewed lunar landing was originally a 2030 goal. They've pulled it toward 2029. Their 2035 horizon is a permanent human settlement on the Moon.
• Japan is investing heavily in lunar development, highlighting its ambition to build long-term domestic capabilities across the lunar sector.
• Korea has world-class facilities — Nick has worked with them. Korea's successful lunar orbital mission, Danuri, demonstrated the strength of its growing lunar capabilities. With continued investment, Korea is positioned to become one of the leading lunar space nations in the Asia-Pacific region.

The structural read for anyone reading this from inside the region: the real race may not be who reaches the Moon first, but who develops the capabilities, expertise and supply chains that will support sustained lunar operations in the decades ahead. That's the real race underneath the press releases.

Now — what do you do with that?

• If you sell to lunar customers → every market is different. Understanding local priorities, procurement pathways and strategic objectives is often more important than following headlines.
• If you're a founder in Japan or Korea → both countries are making significant investments in lunar exploration and space technology. The opportunity lies in developing capabilities that address future mission needs and strengthen regional participation in the lunar economy.
• If you're an investor → watch where governments, agencies and industry are making long-term commitments to lunar infrastructure, technologies and services. The organisations building capabilities today are likely to shape tomorrow's lunar economy.
• If you're a policymaker → China's pull-forward is a forcing function. Every year your country waits to lock in its lunar position is a year China compounds.

The next 24 months could be an important period in which the Asia-Pacific lunar sector further establishes its own capabilities and identity. Watch procurement, not press releases.

What to do with this

• Investors — Interstellar Innovation has a published price list. Real product, real customers.
• Founders — Nick's two-company structure is the cleanest live example of a single-layer specialist with a complementary product in regional lunar. Study it.
• Procurement officers at JAXA, KARI, ISRO, ANGKASA, PhilSA may wish to evaluate regional suppliers alongside international options when assessing future lunar testing requirements.
• Precious subscribers — this is one answer to Issue 04's closing question: who's actually building Layer 6 inside the region?

Direct contact:

• Interstellar Mapping — hello@interstellarmapping.com
• Interstellar Innovation — sales@interstellarinnovation.com.au

Before we go

I asked Nick what he'd say to anyone in the region looking at this industry and not knowing where to start:

"If someone tells you no, you can't do it because of whatever reason… That's all wrong. If there's a will, there's definitely a way."

Read it as a cotton-chipper-turned-oil-engineer-turned-PhD-turned-founder talking. Not a marketer. Hits different. He was such a blimming chap to talk to — and all the more fun if you love discovering what he's actually building in the lunar economy.

Most lunar coverage talks about the companies that failed. Liftoff Asia will be the voice that champions positivity in the Asian space and lunar economy.

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Stay tuned for the next issue about the amazing things happening in Asia!

Cheers!

— shirley