The US space program has faced some tough times lately. You can practically feel the low spirits at the agency, especially after they scrapped the Mars Sample Return project and saw waves of staff either getting fired or quitting.
Jared Isaacman, the tech billionaire and space fan who just became NASA administrator following a second round of hearings, wants to turn things around by prioritizing the Artemis program to get humans living on the Moon full-time. But there is a massive engineering challenge to solve first: keeping a base running during the long, two-week lunar night.
A new announcement explains that NASA and the Department of Energy plan to fix this issue by building a nuclear fission reactor designed specifically for the lunar surface.
The official announcement details a formal agreement, known as a Memorandum of Understanding, to get a nuclear reactor running on the lunar surface by 2030. Usually, these kinds of contracts are for private companies partnering up, so it is a bit of a mystery why two parts of the same US government need to sign one. Still, at the very least, this document gives a solid direction to all the research that has been going on for years.
The Lunar Night: A Logistic Nightmare
It is pretty easy to see why we need this. A full day on the Moon stretches for about a month, meaning the surface is stuck in the dark for half that time. For those roughly two weeks of night, you cannot get any power from the sun at all. There isn’t any wind to catch either, and you definitely won’t find any gas or oil to burn for energy up there. Trying to bring enough batteries to store two weeks’ worth of solar power would just be too heavy and costly to launch into space.
Practically speaking, nuclear power is the only way to solve this right now. We are still years away from getting fusion to work on Earth, and trying to run a base by detonating fusion bombs isn’t something the public would likely support paying for.
That means we are down to just two choices: a radioisotope thermal generator (RTG) or a standard fission reactor. This makes fission the only real choice for NASA and the Department of Energy if they want to make their lunar base a reality. Fortunately, they realized this a long time ago and have been backing studies on it for decades.
Commercial Partnerships and the Designing Stage
Just recently, the agencies handed out $5 million contracts to three different industry groups led by Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, and IX—a partnership between Intuitive Machines and X-energy that likely needed its own agreement to sort out who does what.
The goal was to design a reactor compact enough to fit inside a 12-foot wide launch cylinder while cranking out 40 kilowatts of energy for a minimum of ten years. That is enough electricity to power a few small homes—or, with any luck, a pioneer outpost on the Moon. Although the specific commercial details are confidential, the government seems satisfied enough with the proposals to push ahead with formal design and development, which is probably what drove this week’s agreement.
A Clash of Philosophies
It is anyone’s guess if the agency can actually hit that aggressive deadline, especially given the difficulties they have faced recently. Mr. Isaacman is an entrepreneur at heart, after all, and he has largely brought the “move fast and break things” philosophy of the private space sector with him. Yet, only one of the three designs is coming from teams that really share that spirit. The companies behind IX are fairly new to government work, while Lockheed Martin and Westinghouse have been fixtures for decades, and their slow, cautious approach is a big reason why the New Space movement emerged in the first place.