The White House wants a nuclear reactor ready for launch to the moon by 2030.
Reliable lunar power is the linchpin in NASA’s plans for a “golden age” of space discovery — fueling a habitable moon base, missions to Mars and other space exploration under the agency’s Artemis program.
“This time, the goal is not flags and footprints,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said last week. “This time, the goal is to stay.”
The agency will take a major step forward Wednesday with the planned launch of Artemis II, which aims to slingshot astronauts around the moon and back to Earth. Artemis IV and V, scheduled for 2028, will bring crews to the moon’s surface.
The reactor would be prepped for its journey by the decade’s end. A long-term nuclear power source would support extended manned missions, fueling “habitats, logistics, and other critical systems,” wrote Steven Sinacore, program executive for fission surface power at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio. That means NASA wants to make the moon a habitable, one-stop shop for astronauts.
Experts say the Trump administration’s full-speed-ahead plans range from aspirational to lunacy, raising questions about transporting the reactor more than 200,000 miles from Earth, the tight timeline, running it safely and managing its upkeep from Earth. But the White House sees the effort as key to winning a new space race with China and Russia, which have similar ambitions for a permanent lunar outpost.
“Now we find ourselves with a real geopolitical rival challenging American leadership in the high ground of space,” Isaacman said at an event last week detailing NASA’s moon goals and plans to get there. “The difference between success and failure will be measured in months, not years. They [China and Russia] may be early, and recent history suggests we might be late.”
Expanding plans
Efforts to power a moon base are in the nascent stages, but they have real federal force, backed by an executive order — “Ensuring American Space Superiority” — and an official partnership between NASA and the Department of Energy announced in January.
Congress included $250 million for the reactor in fiscal 2026 spending legislation, though that amount falls far short of the $3 billion that DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory estimated it would cost over the course of five years.
The 2030 deadline to develop a launch-ready reactor is “aggressive but achievable,” said Sebastian Corbisiero, DOE’s national technical director of space reactor programs.
Initially, NASA planned for a 40-kilowatt nuclear reactor on the moon — enough to power about 30 homes, according to the agency. But the latest announcements upped expectations to 100 kW. The change doesn’t drastically alter existing plans, Corbisiero said, but it will make the machine heavier.
“NASA intends to route electricity on the Moon through a grid that will evolve over time from point to point user connections to a distributed system similar to the power grids in the United States,” Sinacore wrote.
A decade’s worth of lunar nuclear power would still equate to less than a day of normal output for Earth’s commercial reactors in terms of how many atoms are split, Corbisiero said. And even though the system would be so much smaller, he said size remains a challenge.
“When you’re trying to put something onto a rocket and launch it to the moon, mass does become a big design factor,” he said.
Using solar energy to generate hundreds of kilowatts would require arrays the size of football fields, said William Pratt, Lockheed Martin’s director of mission strategy and advanced concepts for space nuclear. A compact nuclear system, he said, would offer “game changing capability.”
Lockheed is one of myriad private companies eyeing the project, investing some of its own research and development funds in lunar nuclear reactor development.
Lockheed’s initial efforts are geared toward a 20-kW system, which Pratt said would later be scaled up to a full 100-kW capacity. The machine might weigh more than 15 metric tons, with the reactor itself likely serving as its base in the company’s designs.
That raises the question of how such a heavy machine would get to the moon.
“The thing’s going to weigh a lot more,” Pratt said. “So now we need landers that can carry a lot more.”
NASA didn’t share details about its progress in transportation, stating only that proposals will “present a strategy for collaborating with our contractor team,” a NASA spokesperson said.
“It would require a couple of miracles to happen in sequence to make it happen by 2030,” said Yana Charoenboonvivat, who was involved last year with the Artemis program at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio. “But it’s not impossible.”
Charoenboonvivat, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology aerospace doctoral student, has focused some of her research on the lander, which she said is the factor “connecting the dots from start to end.”
Moon power
Once the reactor is on the moon’s surface, the complications continue.
Most commercial reactors on Earth use pressurized water to cool the system and create power, according to the World Nuclear Association.
When a reactor’s radioactive core undergoes nuclear fission, its atoms split and release heat, which then turns the water to steam. That steam rushes through the machine at high pressure, spinning turbines to generate electricity destined for the grid, according to the association.
In space, the process gets trickier.
A permanent nuclear outpost would be more reliable than solar energy, especially during the moon’s two weeks of dark lunar night. But temperature swings are daunting, with the moon’s surface skyrocketing to 250 degrees Fahrenheit in daylight and plunging to colder than minus 200 F by night, according to NASA.
Water, which would turn to gas and then ice under those conditions, won’t cut it, DOE’s Corbisiero said.
The power core would be uranium, like on Earth, he said, but researchers need to choose a coolant that doesn’t change phases of matter easily, including certain gases or liquefied metals.
Unlike local reactors that shut down for regular maintenance, a moon reactor would need to run continuously for years at a time.
A base on Earth would likely monitor it from afar, he said, and there would be automatic controls to “correct” potential malfunctions, but the practicality of onsite repairs remains a question.
Debating disaster
Despite the confidence expressed by NASA and DOE about the safety of their lunar surface reactor, independent nuclear experts are split on the matter.
An unsalvageable emergency isn’t a pressing worry, but it’s also difficult to say what that would look like on the moon, said Adam Stein, director of the Nuclear Energy Innovation program at The Breakthrough Institute.
Nuclear power plant disasters can be catastrophic on Earth, where wind, water and the ground can absorb and spread radiation. The 1986 explosion of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine — considered one of the most severe in history — left a permanent, contaminated exclusion zone in its wake.
A forest near the plant turned red and withered. People directly exposed to the fallout died, and thousands later developed cancer from exposure to radioactive material, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Numerous other nuclear power plants have suffered technical malfunctions or damage from natural disasters.
The moon is a different matter.
It could just as well prove to be a harsh home, with dust that can damage machinery, brutal temperature swings and a “steady rain” of asteroids, meteoroids and comets battering its surface, according to NASA.
But it also has almost no atmosphere or magnetic field, which means it’s already a radioactive environment. Footprints from the 1969 Apollo 11 landing are still untouched, Stein said, so he wouldn’t expect the reactor’s toxic material to disperse much if something went wrong, even with total exposure of the core.
“If you had a worst-case scenario … you would just not visit that site of the moon in the future,” he said. “There’s nothing that’s forcing us to go to that location again.”
The reactor fuel would be shielded by “multiple layers of metal structure” during normal operations, a NASA spokesperson said, so the chance of its radioactive core being released from mechanical failure or outside factors is “very small.”
“In such an event, the system would shut down and radiation levels would gradually diminish to safe levels for human access and handling,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “The used systems could be moved to a remote storage location where they would not pose a threat to the crew or environment.”
NASA argued that vibrations from the launch and “shock loads” from the landing would be more extreme for the reactor than environmental conditions on the moon.
And NASA is already studying the potential impacts of lunar surface conditions on reactor parts. “Safety processes will be a crucial priority and accounted for in every aspect of the program, including reactor design, test, manufacture, and operation,” the spokesperson wrote.
Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was less optimistic. He said he expects a “100 percent chance of failure.”
“That just is not consistent with any known practices in terms of reactor design development,” he said, regarding what he calls the “ridiculously accelerated” timeline. Overcoming the safety and operational hurdles that come with it in four years is “laughable,” he said.
“You know, it’s a fantasy.”
