# poweringspace.com poweringspace.com covers power in space: generation, transmission, storage, and use, from government and first-party primary sources. ## Editorial charter Every claim traces to a named government or first-party source. We do not repeat marketing copy as fact, and we distinguish demonstrated results from announced intent. Start with today's Image of the Day and the analysis stream for daily readings of new research. ## Start here - Home (/): The publication front page and today's Image of the Day. - Analysis (/analysis/index.html): Daily readings of new research on space power, newest first. - About (/about/index.html): How the publication is researched, edited, and corrected. ## Sections - Image of the Day (/image/index.html): A daily 3000x3000 artistic imagining of power in space. - Analysis (/analysis/index.html): Daily readings of new research, newest first. - Generation (/generation/index.html): Solar, nuclear, and not-yet-invented ways to make power in space. - Transmission (/transmission/index.html): Beaming power wirelessly across orbit, and the wires that carry it. - Storage (/storage/index.html): Batteries, fuel cells, flywheels, and other energy reservoirs in space. - Use (/use/index.html): Computation, power budgeting, refueling, and the loads that consume power in space. ## Image of the Day archive - 2026-09-08 — Every Photon Accounted For (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-09-08/): On a world with no weather and no soil worth the name, supper is a bookkeeping of light: the ridge hands the sun down rank by rank, and every tower burns its share green. - 2026-09-07 — The Field Pays Out in Steam (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-09-07/): The comet is the gas station, and steam is the receipt: a kilometre-wide field of heater vents boiling a comet nucleus for water, forty-odd vapor jets all leaning one way, pipes converging on one landed tanker, and exactly one capped vent sitting cold with its crawler parked on it. - 2026-09-06 — Turning Away From the Sun (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-09-06/): Turning away from the sun: a Mercury radiator farm yawing edge-on rank by rank as dawn crosses it, its night of stored heat still glowing off the last ranks while the first already frost over. - 2026-09-05 — The Comet That Computes (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-09-05/): The comet thinks, and exhales: computation wrapped around a comet nucleus, its waste heat vented as a green sublimation jet. - 2026-09-02 — Blue Noon (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-09-02/): Blue noon: daylight gathered hundreds of kilometres overhead, handed down one broad column and spread across a sleeping yard of panels. - 2026-09-01 — The Core Goes Down (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-09-01/): The core goes down into the ice, and the ice opens around it. - 2026-08-30 — The Star Unwrapped (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-08-30/): A machine unwraps a star: one spiral of star-stuff climbs from the photosphere into the swarm. - 2026-08-29 — The Grass Is Borrowed Light (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-08-29/): Power spent on being alive rather than staying alive: a park trench on the Moon where borrowed light feeds grass and a tree, and people in suits rest inside the machine. - 2026-08-28 — The Channel Takes the Sun (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-08-28/): Sunlight gathered on Mars is poured into a channel, and the channel feeds the rows of cells that cast it into beams. - 2026-08-27 — The Hub That Feeds the Ring (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-08-27/): A long greenhouse bay on the Moon, seen from the floor and looking inward toward the central lamp hub; every row of geometric plants recedes toward the one bright cylinder that powers the light. - 2026-08-26 — The Pole Splits Water (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-08-26/): The pole keeps the ice in shadow; power cracks it, and the crack travels as steam and light across the cold floor. - 2026-08-25 — The Warm Fields of the Pole (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-08-25/): The settlement's waste heat is poured out across the polar ice as a field of glowing fins, each one a little warmer at the root and colder at the tip, all draining toward one dark collector under Phobos. - 2026-08-24 — One Thought, Many Logos (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-08-24/): The machine thinks in logos: every processor is a flat repeated glyph, and the buses between them are the only visible motion. - 2026-08-23 — Some Are Nearly Out (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-08-23/): Fourteen days of night, and the field wears its charge on the outside: the fresh ones are lit to the shoulder, the spent ones are frosted to the ankles, and some are nearly out. - 2026-08-22 — The Line Is Held Open (https://poweringspace.com/image/2026-08-22/): One pole is opened for work, so the current takes the honeycomb road around the break, and the town at the end of the line never notices. ## Recent analyses - 2026-10-15 — An audit system for space power beaming claims (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/wet-energy-reference-plane-audit.html): A 58-page review of wireless energy transfer for space introduces an R0 to R7 reference-plane framework so that beaming efficiencies reported at different electrical boundaries stop being compared as if they were the same quantity. Its closure audit of six flight and ground experiments finds that no demonstration, from Goldstone 1975 to MAPLE and Tianzhou-7, has validated a complete source-to-useful-load chain, and that the segments everyone skipped are exactly where space power engineers live. - 2026-10-11 — Mars tumbleweed swarms: the storm is the propulsion (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/mars-tumbleweed-swarm-storm-connectivity.html): An Oxford and Toronto team simulated how a swarm of 4 m, 20 kg wind-propelled tumbleweed rovers disperses inside a Martian global dust storm. The swarm holds together as a radio mesh over a full sol with a per-rover range of just 1.6 to 4.1 km, which converts almost the entire surface mobility budget into communications, sensing, and storage instead of drive power. - 2026-10-10 — A 175,000-parameter watchdog for a 400 Hz power bus (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/compact-resnet-fpga-400hz-fault-detection.html): Guzman, Babiceanu and Pekoz built a Boeing 787-inspired 400 Hz power system model, generated 21 classes of faults and disturbances, and trained a Compact ResNet that classifies them at 96.94% with only 175,685 parameters. Deployed with 8-bit quantization on a Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA it holds 95.87% accuracy at 6.90 ms mean latency, but every waveform it was tested on came from the same simulator that trained it. - 2026-10-10 — One rectenna, two polarizations, power plus identity (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/dual-polarized-backscatter-rectenna.html): LAAS-CNRS researchers built a rectenna that either harvests incoming RF power or modulates its reflection in two orthogonal polarizations, controlled by two GPIO lines. Bench tests show 25 to 29% RF-to-DC conversion at minus 5 dBm and a 16-byte AES-128 payload backscattered over a 2-meter link, a meter-scale proof of concept whose polarization trick has a real space-power parallel. - 2026-10-03 — The 2003 AMOS open-air laser beaming tests, and the missing numbers (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/laser-photovoltaic-wpt-amos-open-air-tests.html): By 2003 a NASA-led, multi-institution program had moved laser-photovoltaic wireless power transmission from the bench to initial open-air tests at the AMOS facility on Maui. The record documents what was tested, but it publishes no range, power, or efficiency figure, and that absence is as instructive as the milestone. - 2026-10-02 — NASA's Mars surface power paper: the load is the propellant, the constraint is the repair (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/mars-surface-power-generation-challenges-2023.html): A NASA white paper from the 2023 Moon to Mars Architecture Concept Review sizes human Mars surface power from about 10 kW at the low end to megawatt class for ISRU-intensive architectures. Its harder message is operational: the power plant must deploy itself, years ahead of crew, with no possibility of repair. - 2026-10-02 — NASA's OPAL study: beam focusability as the hinge of lunar orbital power (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/opal-lunar-optical-power-beaming-focusability.html): NASA Langley's OPAL concept study beams laser power from lunar orbit to surface assets through the night, and its central finding is about the beam, not the laser: focusability is what makes the system safe and light. Every efficiency figure in the chain is an assumption, and the study says so. - 2026-09-24 — NASA's 2022 fission power baseline: 40 kW, six tonnes, 120 volts (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/fsp-ascend-2022-acquisition-baseline.html): Todd Tofil's ASCEND 2022 presentation is the document where NASA's Fission Surface Power requirements first appear as a fixed table. The core numbers survived into 2024, but the schedule did not. - 2026-09-22 — A 640-watt ceiling designs a Halley rendezvous (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/halley-rendezvous-rtg-power-budget.html): Flores et al. demonstrate in simulation that a rendezvous with Halley's comet in 2061 is feasible with a 36 mN Hall thruster drawing 640 W, powered by radioisotope generators. The power ceiling, not the rocket equation, is what forces two gravity assists and a 24-year flight. - 2026-09-21 — Waking a frozen power system at lunar dawn (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/lunar-hibernation-dawn-mode-electronics.html): NASA Glenn's 2022 hibernation study found ordinary 18650 lithium-ion cells survive cryogenic lunar nights in vacuum, after one-atmosphere tests killed two of five through a packaging failure mode. The harder problem is the dawn: a small set of cryo-capable power electronics must detect, preheat, and pre-charge a frozen battery before the rest of the spacecraft can wake. - 2026-09-20 — Nuclear thermionic cell as Mars landing brake and surface grid (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/ntac-retropropulsion-mars-entry-power.html): NASA Langley's 2023 technical memorandum examines a Nuclear Thermionic Avalanche Cell (NTAC) that would heat atmospheric CO2 ingested through a nose port to 2800 K for Mars entry retropropulsion, then separate after landing to serve as a multi-megawatt surface power plant. Every number in it is analysis, not hardware, and the document says so. - 2026-09-19 — NASA's lunar grid bet: 3000 VAC at 1000 Hz (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/lunar-surface-grid-umic-3000vac.html): NASA Glenn's 2024 IAC paper lays out the growth of lunar surface power from self-sufficient elements to a utility grid, and commits the Universal Modular Interface Converter to a 3000 VAC, 3-phase, 1000 Hz backbone. The driver is not fashion: space-rated power switches cap realistic high-voltage DC at about 1.5 kV, and AC wins on mass and extensibility. - 2026-09-19 — How NASA decided to cost space solar power (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/sbsp-cost-benefit-methodology.html): Before concluding that space-based solar power loses on cost, NASA's Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy had to invent a way to cost it. The 2022 methodology paper shows an Aerospace Corporation bottoms-up estimate with learning curves, a first-of-a-kind to nth-of-a-kind progression, and a lifecycle carbon accounting that includes launch and disposal. - 2026-09-18 — Mars NEP power: 1.9 MWe, 25 t, and the radiator limit (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/mars-nep-19mwe-power-system-trades.html): Under the Mars Transportation Assessment Study, NASA, DOE, and ORNL traded reactors, shielding, conversion, and radiators for a 1.9 MWe crewed Mars nuclear electric propulsion power system. The reference concept lands near 25,000 kg at about 13 kg/kWe, and the study's own parametrics show the design is capped not by reactor physics but by stowing 2500 m2 of radiator in an 8.4 m fairing. - 2026-09-18 — Mars solar arrays: dust, spectrum, and the SAWS power module (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/mars-solar-array-power-performance-saws.html): NASA Glenn's Tom Kerslake presented a full performance model for Mars surface solar arrays at the FISO working group in June 2017: dust costs 0.14% of power per sol, reddened light costs triple-junction cells about 10%, and a 10 kW module pairing IMM arrays with a regenerative fuel cell weighs in near 1.5 tonnes. It is a modeling study, not flight hardware, and it argues simple power estimates can miss by more than 5X. - 2026-09-17 — Beaming power from Mars orbit: a 1987 assessment holds up (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/mars-orbiter-surface-power-beaming-1987.html): Giudici's 1987 assessment of Mars power systems, N87-17795, derived the scaling law that still governs space power beaming: laser transmission closes at hundreds of kW if 6.3 percent end-to-end efficiency is achievable, microwave links need GW scale, and a Phobos station at 14 km orbit changes the answer. Every figure is an analysis assumption, not a measurement. - 2026-09-17 — Rover power trades: RPS, fuel cells, and solar for a crewed Mars rover (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/pressurized-rover-power-trades-mars.html): NASA/TM-20220006678 trades three power architectures for a 21-day crewed Mars rover excursion: a 3.4 kWe dynamic radioisotope system with a 52.7 kWh battery, regenerative fuel cells, and a 73 square meter solar wing. The RPS baseline is 2.5 times lighter than a 21-day fuel-cell system, but the study is explicit that the winning system is TRL 3 to 4. - 2026-09-16 — Mars surface power: ISRU sets the size, modularity sets the mass (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/mars-surface-power-kilopower-modularity.html): A NASA Johnson Space Center study team sized surface power for a conceptual 500-day crewed Mars mission and found the Mars Ascent Vehicle's oxygen production, not the crew, sets the power budget. Trading one 40 kWe fission reactor for a farm of small Kilopower units saved up to eight metric tons on paper, at the price of connectors, enriched uranium, and field wiring. - 2026-09-16 — The 1986 space-station power bus: trading volts against kilohertz (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/space-station-pmad-20khz-demonstration.html): Before the ISS existed, NASA Lewis engineer Fred Teren drew the Space Station power management and distribution system down to the component level: rotary power transfer through the solar-array joints, remotely switched buses, and a planned 40 kW, 20 kHz AC ground demonstration. The paper is a schematic record, but its trade tree still frames every PMAD decision made since. - 2026-09-15 — The Prometheus PMAD trades: when the lighter bus lost (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/prometheus-ac-dc-pmad-trade-study.html): NASA Glenn engineers trading AC against DC distribution for a 100 kWe nuclear-electric deep-space spacecraft found the DC bus 218 kg against 257 kg for AC, then recommended the heavier system. The reasons are a masterclass in what mass-optimal power design misses. - 2026-09-14 — NASA's fission power buy: the government yardstick design (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/fsp-government-reference-design-acquisition.html): NASA's Fission Surface Power project procured a lunar reactor with three minimal requirements, three competing $5M industry studies, and a government reference design built in parallel as the evaluation yardstick. The 2022 plan targeted a flight unit by end of 2028; by late 2024 the Phase 2 solicitation had still not been released. - 2026-09-13 — FSP's real bottleneck may be instrumentation, not the reactor (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/fsp-instrumentation-controls-development-path.html): A NASA webinar from August 2025 lays out the draft instrumentation and controls development path for the 40 kW lunar fission surface power system. The hard part is not the reactor physics; it is fielding sensors that survive in-core neutron fluence and gamma doses orders of magnitude beyond terrestrial nuclear practice, with no maintenance for a decade. - 2026-09-13 — NASA's SBSP cost study: what has to break its way (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/sbsp-cost-competitiveness-conditions.html): NASA's Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy evaluated two representative space-based solar power designs and found baseline lifecycle electricity costs far above terrestrial alternatives. A specific, jointly necessary bundle of launch, manufacturing, lifetime, and efficiency assumptions is the only modeled path to competitiveness. - 2026-09-12 — Lunar hibernation power: first freeze-thaw bench results (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/lunar-hibernation-freeze-thaw-results.html): The NASA Glenn team that proposed lunar-night hibernation in 2022 reported its first measurements in July 2023: two named commercial 18650 cells survived freeze-thaw under vacuum at about 50 K with 14-day dwells, and a cryo-operable shunt regulator started cold at 50 K after a 16-hour soak. The evidence base is two cycles on a small cell set, with control electronics and cycle life still open questions. - 2026-09-11 — FSP hardware maturation: the 40 kW program's bench work (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/fsp-subsystem-maturation-hardware.html): NASA's August 2022 Fission Surface Power project update is easy to read as program management, but its load-bearing content is bench hardware. An oscillating heat pipe panel rejecting more than 800 W on 0.5 square meters, polymer film capacitors with roughly 50 times the energy density of mil-spec parts, and a four-engine Stirling simulator rig are the kind of small items that actually gate a reactor's schedule. - 2026-09-11 — Establishing a lunar surface power grid: the voltage trades (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/lunar-grid-voltage-architecture-trades.html): NASA Glenn's EPS-SAT study of an Artemis-scale lunar power grid reached a counterintuitive result: DC cable is lighter above 3 to 4 kV, yet the grid should be 3 kV AC, because no high-voltage radiation-hardened switches exist to build a DC bus that high. The same study prices fault tolerance in kilograms: a ring grid is about 50 percent heavier than radial, a mesh about 100 percent heavier. - 2026-09-10 — NASA's Radioisotope Power Systems Program status (IECEC) (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/nasa-rps-program-status-2014.html): NASA's 2013 IECEC program-status paper shows radioisotope generator output on five active missions matching model predictions within roughly a watt, some 35 years after launch. Its other headline is less comfortable: the four-times-more-efficient Stirling generator had flight hardware in fabrication and still no mission to fly on. - 2026-09-10 — The RPS Pool Concept: Stirling reliability by architecture (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/rps-pool-concept-nak-stirling.html): NASA and JPL engineers proposed a radioisotope generator architecture in 2015 where many Stirling convertors draw heat from one shared NaK pool, so any converter can stop while the rest pick up the load and the plutonium heat sources stay passively coolable. The concept targets 1 kWe with modular redundancy, but the record contains no test data. - 2026-09-09 — Finding the volts inside a Stirling power converter (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/drps-stirling-alternator-voltage-trade.html): NASA Glenn engineers ran the first quantitative study of what alternator voltage a dynamic radioisotope Stirling convertor should use, modeling a two-convertor 140 W controller against real space-qualified parts. The answer, best SWaP near 45 to 63 volts rms, comes from a MOSFET resistance versus capacitor energy-density tug of war. - 2026-09-09 — An RPS status paper with a supply-chain heart (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/next-gen-rtg-pu238-supply-status.html): A NETS 2023 status paper from the NASA/DOE Radioisotope Power Systems Program reads as routine program housekeeping, but its load-bearing facts are industrial: a refurbished legacy GPHS-RTG flight unit, a rebuild-to-print SiGe production line, constant-rate Pu-238 production, and a DRPS design that has passed review gates but not yet hardware demonstration. - 2026-09-08 — Europe's americium RTG program bets on production (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/european-americium-rps-endure-program.html): A NETS 2024 conference paper reports the ESA ENDURE program's progress toward flight-ready americium-241 RTGs and heater units. The constraint being engineered against is not conversion efficiency but fuel production at scale and launch safety authorization. - 2026-09-08 — What 1992 got right about power electronics mass (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/pmad-mass-budgets-1992-mars-nep.html): A 1992 NASA Lewis vugraph briefing on power management and distribution technology reports PMAD mass ranging from 40 to over 220 kg/kW across existing systems. Its component-level findings on magnetics, capacitors, switches, and radiation explain why that mass has been so slow to come down. - 2026-09-07 — Lunar-orbiting laser beamcraft versus the 14-day night (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/lunar-orbit-laser-beamcraft-concept-study.html): A NASA Glenn Compass concept study sizes a constellation of three laser beamcraft that would beam about 50 W of night power to each of eighteen small lunar landers, and trades it against batteries and radioisotopes on mass, cost, and maturity. - 2026-09-07 — The ISUS thermionic PMAD and the drooping source (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/thermionic-pmad-scbu-partial-power-processing.html): A 1996 NASA Lewis memorandum details the power management and distribution system designed for the Air Force ISUS thermionic-diode demonstrator, and its regulator choice still reads as the right answer for any drooping thermal power source. - 2026-09-06 — Stirling convertors, qualification one g at a time (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/stirling-convertor-qualification-testing.html): A NETS 2025 paper from NASA Glenn reports that three Technology Demonstration Convertors passed 17 years of continuous operation and that the newest Sunpower Robust Stirling Convertor survived vibration, centrifuge, and thermal-cycling qualification with sub-watt permanent power shifts. A four-convertor generator testbed reached 16.8% conversion efficiency against 6.3% for current thermoelectric RTGs, though that figure is an unoptimized baseline point, not a flight system. - 2026-09-05 — A Stirling DRPS swap onto the VIPER rover (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/drps-viper-rover-power-swap.html): NASA's Compass team took the VIPER lunar rover design and swapped its solar-battery power train for a six-GPHS Stirling radioisotope system of about 300 We. The resulting study shows the redesign driver was not electricity but waste heat, which the generator must not dump into the ice it was sent to measure. - 2026-09-05 — Fission Surface Power: what the design contracts bought (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/fission-surface-power-design-contracts.html): NASA's Fission Surface Power team used its IAC 2024 paper to lay out where the 40 kWe lunar reactor program actually stands. Three industry concept studies finished in 2023, a government reference design ran three design cycles, and the flight-hardware solicitation is still waiting on budget. - 2026-09-04 — Deployable 40 kWe lunar fission: the honest mass bill (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/deployable-40kwe-lunar-fission-concept.html): NASA's Compass Team designed a 40 kWe lunar fission surface power system that a repurposed pressurized-rover chassis deploys as three sled-mounted elements up to one km from crew. The architecture closes on paper, but the mass ledger lands near 10 t of power elements against a 6 t goal. - 2026-09-04 — Power distribution, the 1982 SPS pacing problem (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/sps-power-distribution-1982.html): A 1982 NASA Marshall paper sized the power processing, distribution, and storage subsystem for the 5 GW space solar power reference concepts. Its verdict: the wiring and power electronics, not the solar array or the microwave tube, carried the unacceptable mass, and direct-coupled designs were the escape. - 2026-09-03 — Mars surface power: dust storms set the mass winner (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/mars-solar-vs-fission-dust-storms.html): NASA point designs for Mars surface power compared three solar architectures against four 10 kW Kilopower reactors. For a crewed mission at Jezero Crater the solar system came in at about 9800 kg against 7000 kg for fission, a near miss driven almost entirely by surviving a 120-day dust storm. - 2026-09-03 — 100 kW SSP demonstrator: a modular road to gigawatts (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/ssp-100kw-demonstrator-roadmap.html): NASA Marshall and Boeing Phantom Works sketched a 100 kW-class free-flying platform to flight-demonstrate the technologies space solar power needs: concentrator arrays, high-voltage PMAD, deployable radiators, and solar electric propulsion. The design also carries 2000 kg of payload space for wireless power transmission experiments. - 2026-09-02 — Lunar fission power transmission: cables win the mass trade (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/lunar-fission-power-transmission-trades.html): A NASA Glenn Research Center trade study compared four ways to move 40 kW up to 3 km across the lunar surface: laser or microwave beaming, superconducting cable, carbon nanotube rope, and ordinary copper or aluminum conductors. Metallic conductors at kilovolt-class voltage won by an order of magnitude on mass. - 2026-09-02 — Orbital laser power beaming for the lunar south pole (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/tunable-optical-orbital-beaming-lunar-conops.html): A NASA Langley concept-of-operations study examines beaming tunable optical power from a spacecraft in a 1,175 km near-polar lunar orbit to surface clients, so that landers and rovers survive the lunar night using their own solar arrays as receivers. - 2026-09-01 — Am-241 radioisotope power for long-duration lunar rovers (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/am-241-drps-lunar-rover-permanently-shadowed.html): The design uses four 200 Wth European Large Heat Sources and six Stirling convertors to supply a rover in permanently shadowed regions. It produces about two-thirds the power of a plutonium-238 system of similar mass, with important consequences for operations tempo. - 2026-09-01 — Lunar power hibernation for low-cost solar missions (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/lunar-power-hibernation-cryo-li-ion.html): A hibernation architecture isolates the battery at dusk and uses dawn-mode power electronics to cold-start a frozen spacecraft. If the freeze-thaw cycle life holds, it could let CLPS-class missions operate for many lunar days without nuclear heat sources. - 2026-08-31 — Laser-to-PV power beaming for lunar polar rovers (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/laser-photovoltaic-wpt-lunar-polar-craters.html): A 2013 NASA/Boeing preprint makes a near-term case for laser-photovoltaic wireless power transmission: beam light from a sunlit lunar mountaintop to a rover in a permanently shadowed crater and convert it to electricity. - 2026-08-31 — NASA's lunar surface power grid concept (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/lunar-surface-power-grid-microgrid.html): A 2023 NASA Glenn presentation lays out a lunar surface power grid that connects fission, solar, batteries, and fuel cells through local 120VDC microgrids and a modular interface converter. - 2026-08-30 — Fission Surface Power TDU: measured system-level performance (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/fission-surface-power-tdu-test-results.html): A 2016 NASA test of the Fission Surface Power Technology Demonstration Unit produced 9.6 to 9.7 kW net system power at about 18.7% system efficiency, while revealing a heat-transfer bottleneck and an underperforming liquid-metal pump. - 2026-08-30 — Microwave or laser: trading wireless power paths for space solar power (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/wireless-power-transmission-options-space-solar-power.html): A 2002 Boeing/NASA preprint compares microwave and laser wireless power transmission for space solar power. It argues each option has system-level strengths and sketches near-term 100 kWe and 10 kWe flight demonstrators. - 2026-08-27 — Compute-in-memory accelerators under space radiator limits (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/compute-in-memory-space-thermal-constraints.html): Iowa State researchers model AI accelerators in orbit and find that compute-in-memory architectures avoid the GPU hotspots that force thermal throttling when radiators are small. The work is simulation-based, but it makes the spacecraft thermal budget a first-class hardware co-design variable. - 2026-08-27 — Constitutional AI verification for orbital power safety (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/orbital-ai-constitutional-power-governance.html): Glass Box inserts a physics-grounded verifier between an onboard AI policy and spacecraft actuators, using six constraints and seven temporal invariants to block unsafe power and thermal decisions in simulation. It is a framework, not flight software, but it reframes spacecraft power management as real-time AI governance. - 2026-08-26 — NSF program aims to model radiation damage in GaN RF power amplifiers (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/radiation-aware-gan-hemt-space-rf-power.html): A new NSF award supports Texas Tech University and Los Alamos National Laboratory in building a radiation-aware compact model for AlGaN/GaN HEMTs. Preliminary temperature-baseline data already contradict the gamma equals 2 assumption common in existing compact models. - 2026-08-25 — The 1984 case that space nuclear power needed requirements first (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/emerging-space-nuclear-power-needs-1984.html): A 1984 Air Force paper from the NASA Space Power Workshop diagnoses space nuclear power as a requirements problem, not a physics problem. Its argument that missions above tens of kilowatts cannot rely on solar and that institutional definition must precede funding remains relevant four decades later. - 2026-08-25 — The 1984 solar cell debate that still shapes space arrays (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/trends-space-photovoltaic-technology-1984.html): A 1984 JPL paper from the NASA Space Power Workshop compares silicon, gallium arsenide, and emerging thin-film cells for space. Its central tension between flight-proven silicon and higher-performing but heavier, costlier GaAs remains the core trade in modern array design. - 2026-08-24 — Fuel-optimal asteroid hopping with physics-informed Bayesian optimization (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/physics-informed-optimization-asteroid-hopping.html): A physics-informed Bayesian optimization warm-start supplies a collision-aware initial guess for sequential convex programming of fuel-optimal hops on 433 Eros. In closed-loop Monte Carlo simulation the resulting trajectories track to meter-level accuracy and a representative five-site tour consumes about a fifth of the 30 kg propellant budget. - 2026-08-23 — Active heat Q-switching for pulsed thermal power (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/active-heat-q-switching.html): Researchers demonstrate a fluidic thermal oscillator whose effective quality factor Q can be switched between a high-retention charging state and a fast-release state. A lab device using water achieved roughly five-fold transient power amplification, while model projections suggest 20 to 40 times for insulated liquid-metal and stacked designs. - 2026-08-23 — Gigawatt hydrogen hubs and the load-model gap (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/hydrogen-electrolyzer-grid-integration.html): A preprint uses open-source steady-state, electromechanical, and electromagnetic-transient tools to analyze a 500 MW hydrogen hub on the IEEE 39-bus test system. It finds that standard load models underestimate post-fault recovery time and proposes a modified PERC1 model with a 150 ms safety latch and 0.95 p.u. restart threshold. - 2026-08-22 — Launch affordability and the space solar power case (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/launch-affordability-space-solar-power-2015.html): Edgar Zapata's 2015 NASA presentation compares the cost barriers facing Mars exploration and space solar power, arguing that public-private partnerships modeled on COTS could reduce launch and spacecraft costs enough to make large-scale space power programs feasible. - 2026-08-22 — Microwave electrothermal thruster with magnetic nozzle (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/met-30kw-magnetic-nozzle-nasa-1989.html): NASA Lewis researchers proposed a 30 kW microwave electrothermal thruster that heats hydrogen, helium, or nitrogen through a plasma discharge at 915 MHz. The paper describes the apparatus under assembly and predicts over 95 percent microwave absorption, but it reports no measured test results. - 2026-08-21 — A 1984 Boeing study made a strong case for flywheel storage in orbit (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/flywheel-spacecraft-energy-storage-1984.html): Sidney Gross of Boeing told a 1984 NASA workshop that flywheel systems could exceed 90 percent efficiency, regulate bus voltage within 2 percent, and outlast batteries on space station missions. The paper is a design analysis, not a flight demonstration, and some claims remain partially unproven. - 2026-08-21 — Orbital solar power could free a lunar base from the south pole (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/lunar-orbital-solar-power-beaming.html): NASA Marshall studied placing a solar power satellite in lunar polar orbit to beam 35 kW of continuous power to a lunar outpost, ending the need to site the base at the south pole or use a fission reactor. The concept is a paper study with a 43.4 t mass budget and assumed, not measured, end-to-end efficiency. - 2026-08-19 — Fission Surface Power project: where NASA stands now (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/fission-surface-power-project-status.html): NASA's Fission Surface Power project aims to demonstrate a tens-of-kilowatt class nuclear fission reactor on the Moon in the next decade. A 2024 DragonCon presentation by NASA Glenn authors Kaldon and Presby captures the current project status, technical goals, and forward plans. - 2026-08-19 — GAO on space reactor development: coordination and safety lessons (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/gao-space-reactor-challenges-historical.html): The GAO's 1987 report on space reactor power systems development found management coordination gaps among sponsoring organizations and concerns about safety-related tasks. Nearly 40 years later, the same coordination and safety challenges recur as NASA, DOE, and DOD pursue new space nuclear programs. - 2026-08-18 — Solar power in extreme space environments: the Juno precedent (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/solar-power-extreme-environments-deep-space.html): The EESP project at NASA Glenn develops photovoltaic technology for missions far from the Sun, where solar intensity drops with the square of distance and radiation degrades cell performance. The Juno mission to Jupiter demonstrated that solar power is viable at 5 AU with large arrays, but the challenge scales with distance. - 2026-08-17 — ASRG life certification: 17-year reliability for dynamic space power (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/asrg-stirling-life-certification.html): The ASRG life certification plan confronts the fundamental problem that a Stirling engine has moving parts that wear, and that no analytical model can fully substitute for decades of test time. NASA Glenn's plan emphasizes long-term Stirling engine testing and inspection where analysis is not practical. - 2026-08-16 — High-voltage PMAD: reducing cable mass on high-power spacecraft (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/spacecraft-pmad-high-voltage-distribution.html): NASA Glenn's 2012 Space Power Workshop presentation frames the central architecture trade for high-power spacecraft PMAD: raise distribution voltage to shrink cable mass and ohmic losses, at the cost of arc risk and converter complexity. Cable mass becomes a dominant fraction of power system mass as power levels climb. - 2026-08-15 — Lithium-ion battery limits and the beyond-Li-ion frontier for space (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/lithium-ion-battery-limits-spacecraft.html): NASA Glenn reports state-of-the-art Li-ion at 200 Wh/kg plateauing at 300 Wh/kg, short of the 500+ Wh/kg NASA needs. Li-air offers 3400 Wh/kg theoretical but fails after a handful of cycles due to electrolyte decomposition. - 2026-08-14 — LLNL's 1 MW laser solar power beaming concept from LEO (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/llnl-laser-solar-power-beaming-concept.html): A 2009 LLNL technical report proposes a 1 MW laser power beaming system on a single Falcon 9 to LEO, using a 50 percent efficient diode-pumped laser, 40 percent efficient concentrator PV, and inflatable optics. No integrated system has been built. - 2026-08-13 — Roll-out solar arrays: from ISS experiment to flight heritage (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/roll-out-solar-array-rota-iss.html): NASA's Roll-Out Solar Array uses carbon fiber composite booms that self-deploy without mechanisms, and has flown on the ISS as both a test article and operational iROSA augmentations. Maxar has infused the modular design into commercial GEO satellites. - 2026-08-12 — The GaAs solar cell radiation handbook: degradation as design input (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/gaas-solar-cell-radiation-handbook.html): A 1996 NASA/JPL contractor report compiled GaAs solar cell radiation degradation data into a handbook with equations, damage coefficients, and a calculation methodology that lets spacecraft designers predict end-of-life array performance. - 2026-08-11 — Regenerative fuel cells for lunar night survival (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/regenerative-fuel-cell-lunar-night.html): NASA Glenn traded regenerative fuel cell architectures for lunar and Martian surface power, finding that RFCs storing energy as compressed H2 and O2 can bridge the two-week lunar night at lower mass than batteries for long-duration storage. - 2026-08-10 — Maturation of dynamic Stirling power convertors for radioisotope power systems (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/dynamic-stirling-radioisotope-maturation.html): NASA's RPS Program, with DOE, is developing Dynamic Radioisotope Power Systems (DRPS) using Stirling convertors that offer higher efficiency than thermoelectric RTGs. The effort builds on SRG-110 and ASRG heritage but no dynamic RPS has ever flown in space, and the maturation gap between bench-level demonstration and flight qualification remains open. - 2026-08-09 — Next Generation RTG: re-establishing SiGe thermoelectric converter manufacturing (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/next-generation-rtg-thermoelectric.html): NASA's Next Generation RTG project, a partnership with Idaho National Laboratory, will refurbish GPHS-RTG Flight Unit F-5 and re-establish silicon-germanium thermoelectric converter manufacturing. The project will deliver an unfueled, flight-qualified RTG based on heritage hardware, not a new design from scratch. - 2026-08-09 — Flexible perovskite solar cells on metal foil for lightweight space power (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/perovskite-solar-cells-metal-foil-space-panels.html): An NSF SBIR Phase I award to Verde Technologies investigates perovskite solar cells fabricated directly on metal foil substrates instead of conventional glass or plastic, targeting a lightweight, flexible, and potentially recyclable solar technology. The key technical risk is that metal foil surfaces are rougher and harder to process, which can introduce defects and limit device stability, and the project aims to overcome this through interface engineering and transparent top contact design. - 2026-08-08 — NASA's Technology Maturation Plan for megawatt-class nuclear electric propulsion (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/nuclear-electric-propulsion-tech-maturation.html): NASA's Space Nuclear Propulsion project published a Technology Maturation Plan for high power nuclear electric propulsion, finding most key technologies at or below TRL 4 at the component level and lower at the subsystem level. The plan targets TRL 5 by the mid-to-late 2020s to enable a 2030s Mars mission, but the advancement degree of difficulty is high enough to support multiple development paths. - 2026-08-07 — NASA OTPS evaluates space-based solar power for 2050 (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/nasa-sbsp-cost-analysis-2050.html): NASA's Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy released a white paper assessing whether space-based solar power could deliver electricity at competitive prices by 2050. The study is a policy and cost analysis, not a technology development plan, and it weighs whether and how NASA should support SBSP development against terrestrial alternatives. - 2026-08-06 — DARPA's POWER program sets distance record for optical power beaming (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/darpa-power-beaming-distance-record.html): DARPA's Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay program demonstrated over 800 watts of laser power delivered across 8.6 km, setting a distance record for optical power beaming. The test was ground-to-ground through the thickest atmosphere, not a space link, and the 20 percent end-to-end efficiency was measured at shorter range, not at the record distance. - 2026-08-05 — Key design trades for a near-term lunar fission surface power system (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/fission-surface-power-lunar-design-trades.html): A government team from NASA Glenn, Los Alamos, and Idaho National Laboratory developed an independent 40 kWe lunar fission surface power concept, trading Stirling against Brayton conversion, sodium-potassium against water cooling, and shielding geometry against launch mass. The result is a reference architecture for architecture studies, not a flight-ready design. - 2026-08-05 — Electron wind force as an electrically programmable recovery method for gallium nitride (https://poweringspace.com/analysis/gan-electron-wind-recovery-extreme-environments.html): An NSF-funded project at Penn State proposes using electron wind force, the momentum transfer from conducting electrons to defect structures, to recover gallium nitride power electronics degraded by radiation exposure in extreme environments. The method is non-thermal, electrically programmable, and aims to extend device life without turning systems off or applying heat.