Nuclear fission may be met with skepticism here on Earthabout getting the funding and development it needs to advance sufficiently to help us in our efforts to decarbonize, but exploiting it on the lunar surface circumvents much of that problem. NASA announced Tuesday that it is awarding contracts to three vendors to provide designs for nuclear power systems that would be suitable for use on the Moon.
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The winning bids for this award came from Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse , and IX (a joint venture of Intuitive Machines and X-Energy). Each will work with a few partners to develop systems , which will only be “initial ideas” for the purposes of satisfying this specific contract, and each will receive approximately $5 million for work , which is expected to take about 12 months.
NASA is also working with the Department of Energy (DOE) on this project, and the specifications include a 40-kilowatt power generation capacity, capable of producing it for at least a decade. That's about the amount of energy that a full charge provides to a current basic Nissan Leaf. However, as a fission generator, it would obviously have to provide it continuously.
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It may not seem like much, but if deployed individually or in groups to support a lunar base, it could solve many of the challenges of the prolonged occupation of the Moon, which NASA plans to eventually create through the Artemis, which seeks to return humans to our largest natural satellite for sustained scientific missions.
Conditions on the moon (and Mars) face many of the same challenges that we face with other energy sources, such as solar, here on Earth: Namely, they must be able to operate consistently, regardless of the availability of sunlight and harsh environments.
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NASA also notes that the work done for this contract could have other future applications for propulsion systems for spacecraft for deep space.
