Much as the European explorers set off into the unknown in pursuit of riches, the future of human exploration in space will be driven by commerce.
NASA makes a lot of announcements about big projects that it promises will come to fruition in a few years. Too often, those projects are delayed, pared back, or canceled entirely as the agency discovers new priorities or has new priorities imposed on it by Washington. It’s wise, therefore, not to overinvest in acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy’s announcement that America plans to put a 100-kilowatt nuclear reactor on the surface of the moon by 2030. But if the agency and the Trump administration intend to seriously contest the next space race, this will be a vital element of America’s strategic position outside Earth’s atmosphere.
After all, it is a race — at least, it is according to Duffy. “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,” he said in a directive announcing the initiative. “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.”
That’s quite the revelation. NASA is explicit in its intention to beat the Chinese in the effort to establish the infrastructural foundations of what could one day become the site of a permanent human presence on the moon because Beijing would declare it an exclusion zone. Presumably, the United States hopes to do the same. We can thus conclude that earthly geopolitics will extend to extraplanetary bodies — it’s just a matter of time and a question of who sets the rules of the road first.
It remains an open question where on the lunar surface NASA intends to situate a small modular nuclear reactor. ABC News speculates that the site is likely to be located near the moon’s equatorial region, if only because its report notes that the lunar diurnal cycle is only 15 days long and a reactor would supplement the lack of solar power for the other 15 days of the month.
Possibly. It’s just as possible, perhaps even probable, that NASA would look toward the moon’s poles. There, the sun shines for most of the year, but low on the horizon and with less direct sunlight. But that’s also where the moon’s estimated 600 million tons of water ice is located. That’s what a reactor would be most useful for — not powering a site for permanent human habitation, which would encounter many technological obstacles, but for taking water molecules apart, providing astronauts with an indigenous supply of oxygen and hydrogen. That wouldn’t solve all the engineering problems lunar colonists would encounter, but it would provide a local source of breathable oxygen (to be supplemented with nitrogen and other molecules from Earth) and fuel the craft that sojourn from the surface to, perhaps, a platform in orbit around the moon.
Establishing long-term human habitation on the moon is easier said than done. The lunar surface is regularly pelted with micrometeoroids that travel at intense speeds with no atmosphere to slow them down. You don’t want to be clipped by one. Likewise, the moon is bombarded with solar radiation, and building shelters sufficient to block those rays will require the development and deployment of new technologies. One promising proposal would use autonomous 3D printing robots to make radiation-absorbing structures out of lunar regolith — a bold proposal that is, nevertheless, years away from implementation. And then, there are the moonquakes — significant seismic events that can be triggered by temperature changes on the surface and produce sustained tremors that could threaten an outpost’s structural integrity.
These are all engineering challenges. If the whole of human history is any indication, they are, therefore, surmountable. And, in the long term, establishing something like a fuel depot on the moon would open the inner solar system up to exploration and development. That probably sounds science-fictional from our current historical vantage. But ten years ago, the same could be said of the private orbital industries already in development or even operation: hospitality and tourism, research and development, orbital travel, and, of course, the various ventures that the military and its contractors pursue in space.
Skeptics of the utility of human space exploration are probably disappointed with NASA’s new initiative. The agency’s resources are finite (and inefficiently allocated to wasteful constituency maintenance programs), and Duffy’s reactor will steal capital from other programs, “including a nearly 50 percent cut for science missions,” Politico reported. But mankind will not be drawn to space in numbers only to contribute to the sum of human knowledge. In much the same way that the European explorers set off into the unknown in pursuit of riches, the future of human exploration in space will be driven by commerce. Indeed, the revolution in commercial spaceflight suggests that this epochal development is already under way.