‘If you lead in space, you lead on Earth’: Space race heats up as US fast tracks plans for nuclear reactor on Moon
Long gone are the Cold War days of nations competing to be the first to get their man on the Moon. Now there’s a different, much more permanent goal.
The space race is heating up.
Long gone are the Cold War days of nations competing to be the first to get their man on the Moon, now there’s a different, much more permanent goal.
“It has definitely changed,” Art Cotterell, a Research Associate at the ANU School of Regulation and Global Governance, told news.com.au.
“Now what we’re seeing is both the US and China looking to land on the lunar south pole and establish a more permanent human presence there.”
The US recently kicked things up a gear, accelerating its plans to put a nuclear reactor on the Moon to power a future human base in just a matter of years.
In a directive – first reported by Politico earlier this month – NASA’s interim administrator Sean Duffy ordered the agency to have a 100-kilowatt nuclear reactor ready to launch to the Moon by 2030.
“Since March 2024, China and Russia have announced on at least three occasions a joint effort to place a reactor on the Moon by the mid-2030s,” Mr Duffy wrote in the directive, which is dated July 31.
“The first country to do so could potentially declare a keep-out zone which would significantly inhibit the United States from establishing a planned Artemis presence if not there first,” he added, referencing NASA’s Artemis program, which plans to send the first humans to the Moon’s South Pole.
When later asked about the planned reactor at a press conference this month, Mr Duffy, who also serves as President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, stressed the US has clear competition.
“We’re in a race to the Moon, in a race with China to the Moon,” he told reporters.
“And to have a base on the Moon, we need energy. And some of the key locations on the Moon, we’re going to get solar power, but this fission technology is critically important.”
He said the 100 kilowatts of output of the reactor would be the “same amount of energy a 2,000-square-foot home uses every three and a half days”
“So we’re not talking about massive technology.”
In a separate post on X, he declared the US is “going to bring nuclear fission to the lunar surface to power our base”, adding, “if you lead in space, you lead on Earth”.
The announcement comes after a senior Chinese space official presented the concept of building a nuclear power plant on the Moon to power its research station with Russia, at an event attended by International Lunar Research Station partners in April, according to Reuters.
However, the plan has not been officially announced by China.
Mr Cotterell said the South Pole of the Moon is seen as an “ideal location” for the US and China to build a more permanent base because of its access to finite resources needed to sustain human life.
“In terms of that particular location, there’s water ice which could be used to help sustain any sort of infrastructure in human life, but also for potential fuel for onward journeys. And that’s very finite.
“There’s also the limited and finite availability of sunlight.”
The Moon experiences 14 days of straight sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness. But on the South Pole, some high mountain ridges experience near perpetual sunlight.
Are nations allowed to build nuclear reactors on the Moon?
Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which provides the basic framework on international space law, space belongs to everyone, with no nation allowed to claim national appropriation or sovereignty.
The treaty, signed by Russia, the US and dozens of other nations, also forbids nations from placing nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies.
But there is nothing in the treaty which prohibits the placement of a nuclear reactor on the Moon – “providing it is peaceful,” Dr Rebecca Connolly, an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney’s Law School and the Chair of the Board of the Space Law Council of Australia and New Zealand told news.com.au.
“However, it is the ‘deployment’ and ‘operation’ of such infrastructure that is complicated. And this is what has the international community concerned,” she said.
Dr Connolly questioned whether nations placing nuclear reactors on the Moon would “carve out operational ‘safety’ control zones” – essentially establishing exclusion areas.
“Will this amount to a ‘defacto’ territorial claim, explicitly prohibited by the Outer Space Treaty? If so, we may see the line between safety and sovereignty over lunar territory blur.”
She said the reactor could also determine how nations engage in lunar activities.
“When one nation unilaterally plants major infrastructure like a nuclear reactor on the Moon, a place shared by all humanity, it risks setting the rules by default.
“At a time when the international community is only beginning to negotiate governance norms for lunar activities (such as space resources mining), such moves may shape norms before there has been any real debate,” she warned.
Why nuclear?
Nuclear power is “essential” for space exploration, Associate Professor Edward Obbard, a Nuclear Materials Engineer in the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at UNSW told news.com.au.
“It’s the only way to take lots of power sources that’s both energy dense and power dense with you,” he said.
“If you’re going to keep people alive for long enough to do something interesting on the Moon or on Mars, you need a power source and you need a heat source as well. That’s really important because space is cold.”
Nuclear power also offers advantages over solar given the Moon’s 14 days of continuous darkness.
“I think whoever can take the biggest nuclear reactor with them, will be able to build the biggest base (on the Moon) and stay for the longest,” he said.
Dr Obbard said nuclear reactors designed for space use a technology called heat pipes to transfer heat.
“They don’t have your normal kind of boiling water circuit that you would in a power station or in a naval propulsion reactor,” he explained. “In a space reactor, you might have something like molten salt or liquid metal which can save you weight and make a very small compact reactor.”
While he said building a nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030 is “ambitious”, it could be “feasible because a lot of the reactor technology that we’re talking about is not really new”.
“It’s not like we need to create whole new technologies for this. It’s about assembling and integrating probably what organisations like the US Department of Energy already have and testing it.”
Since the 1960s, nuclear power sources have been used in space, including in satellites, Voyager probes and rovers on Mars, such as Curiosity and its younger sibling Perseverance.
Since 2000, NASA has invested $US200 million ($A308 million) towards developing fission power systems, however, none have progressed towards flight readiness, Mr Duffy’s directive states.
The most recent effort was in 2023 with the completion of three $US5 million ($A7.7 million) industry study contracts, which focused on generating 40 kilowatts of power.
‘Serious concerns’
Dr Connolly said placing nuclear reactors on the Moon raises “serious” environmental concerns including radioactive contamination, waste accumulation, and interference with future scientific research on a pristine environment.
“How we treat the Moon now could permanently shape its accessibility, safety, and shared use for generations to come,” she said.
Before launching into space, a nuclear reactor would be required to undergo rigorous safety assessments.
Mr Cotterell said new nuclear safety principles were put in place after a Soviet satellite, Kosmos 954, malfunctioned while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere in 1978, spreading radioactive debris across northern Canada.
“There was a lot of concern at the time that it was carrying a nuclear power reactor on board and what it meant for re-entry,” he said.
“It led to the US and Canada working together to recover that radioactive debris and then diplomatic exchanges between Washington and Moscow … and that concentrated the minds of the international community to try and establish principles on nuclear safety.”
Going forward, he said it’s important to “continue these sorts of dialogues within multilateral forums, like the UN committee, to make sure that we’re not causing harm … because we’ve seen sometimes accidents do happen, so we need to think about those environmental risks.”
Call for co-operation over competition
As the US competes with China, and companies as well as other nations direct their attention to the Moon, Mr Cotterell calls for global co-operation, warning against treating the Moon “as a prize for whoever gets the first”.
“It may sound idealistic, but I think we can’t lose sight of that because at the end of the day, we do really risk launching these sorts of same global inequalities or divisions that are occurring on Earth into space and frankly, that hasn’t served us that well here on Earth.”
Mr Cotterell said he would like to see nations build shared infrastructure for the benefit of everyone, noting history has taught us that nations, even in times of high geopolitical rivalry, can work together.
“During the first space race so to speak, we did see that tensions ended up becoming lowered over time and so we can only hope that is able to be repeated here.”
He reminded competing nations: “Whatever we do on the Moon, we need to think this is going to have impacts well into the future.”
Originally published as ‘If you lead in space, you lead on Earth’: Space race heats up as US fast tracks plans for nuclear reactor on Moon
