Instinct Space
22 June 2026
LONDON, UK and Luxembourg, Luxembourg – June 2026. Instinct Space and Polimak Space announce a partnership to deliver a low-cost lunar mission focused exclusively on regolith access, offering researchers, institutional players, and commercial ISRU developers an unprecedented level of access to the lunar surface.
Under the terms of this strategic agreement, Instinct Space will supply and operate the lunar lander to secure transit to the lunar surface. Central to the mission architecture is the integration of Polimak Space's newly developed LunaRig platform.
The LunaRig is a universal, flight-ready platform that enables lunar landers to integrate a continuous regolith excavation and vertical conveying mechanism. By lifting raw regolith directly to customer payloads and scientific instruments mounted on the lander deck, the system allows onboard payloads to work, experiment, and process material in a controlled environment. This setup completely eliminates the operational risks and mass penalties associated with complex robotic arms, specialized rovers, or external deployment mechanisms, delivering unprecedented economies of scale for regolith-centric lunar missions.
At the core of the LunaRig system is Polimak Space's proprietary Modular Drum Conveyor (MDC) technology. Leveraging Polimak's extensive terrestrial heritage in heavy bulk material handling, the MDC has been engineered from the ground up to handle extraterrestrial materials reliably and at scale.
The MDC system delivers several mission-critical advantages through a streamlined drive design that ensures ultra-reliable material extraction while bypassing the high-failure-risk linkages common in traditional space robotics. Its fully sealed, dust-proof enclosure is engineered to withstand the abrasive nature of lunar dust, preventing clogging and mechanical binding, while specialized sieving mechanisms integrate directly into the continuous conveying stream for in-line sorting. Throughout the process, material is transported smoothly, preserving the original mechanical composition of the excavated regolith.
Instinct Space was founded in 2024 to enable the lunar access that is needed today. Its backers include Y Combinator and NVIDIA Inception Program. Its lunar landers are designed to launch as rideshares to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), without the need for a dedicated launch to the Moon, before flying onward to the lunar surface. This architecture allows the lander to deliver 20kg of payload at a higher flight cadence and lower cost than current missions.
Polimak Space was founded in 2025 to pioneer lunar infrastructure, dedicated to solving the complexities of off-world bulk material handling. The company combines space systems engineering with the 50-year industrial heritage of its origin company, Polimak Industrial, developing proprietary regolith conveying architectures since 2022. By bringing heavy industrial reliability to the Moon, Polimak Space delivers the robust, dust-proof infrastructure required to unlock sustainable In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) at scale.
The need for lunar infrastructure is becoming ever more pressing. The current bottleneck is access to the lunar terrain, and understanding how our collective vision of human settlements on the Moon can be achieved. The regolith access mission is scheduled for a launch window between 2029 and 2030.
To learn more about Polimak Space, visit https://polimak.space/