Lunar fission power

The Moon goes dark for fourteen days at a time. Nothing we've sent there survives that on sunlight alone.

No permanent presence on the Moon is possible until something solves power through the night. Curie Nuclear is building toward a fission system that can.

Conceptual model — illustrative only. Drag to rotate.

Why now

NASA and DOE have re-committed to a 2030 lunar reactor.

NASA and the Department of Energy renewed their partnership to pursue a lunar fission surface reactor, restructuring the program around a more aggressive 2030 target. The contractor landscape is still forming.

~14 days

Length of a lunar night that solar systems must survive on stored power alone.

~$1M+/kg

Rough cost to land mass on the lunar surface. Every kilogram saved matters.

2030

NASA and DOE's current target for a flight-ready lunar fission reactor.

The physics

Why mass-efficient power matters more here than almost anywhere else.

Two relationships drive nearly every design decision in this space.

P ∝ T⁴

Radiators reject waste heat in proportion to the fourth power of operating temperature. A modest increase in operating temperature can shrink radiator mass dramatically — making power conversion architecture one of the highest-leverage design choices in the system.

$/kg

At roughly $1M or more per kilogram landed on the lunar surface, mass is close to the entire cost equation. Trimming mass anywhere in the stack changes the program's economics directly.

Our approach

Built on architectures NASA has already demonstrated.

Our thinking starts from where the engineering leverage actually is.

Passive heat transport over pumped loops

Sodium heat pipes — as demonstrated in NASA's Kilopower/KRUSTY program — remove the single biggest reliability risk in a system meant to run unattended for years: moving mechanical parts.

Minimize fissile inventory and mechanism count

The fastest credible path to a flying demonstration is the smallest reactor that still proves the architecture, not the most powerful one. Smaller cores mean a more tractable safety review.

Build toward the existing regulatory path

A real reactor program runs through DOE and Idaho National Laboratory for fuel, safety basis, and criticality review, and through the interagency nuclear launch safety process. We're building our roadmap around that reality.