As more and more hardware goes into Earth orbit, and eventually to the moon and Mars, where will the power to run all those machines come from?
That’s one of the questions under consideration at a State of the Space Industrial Base workshop that’s being conducted this week at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.
The workshop, hosted by Space Northwest, is bringing together government, academic and commercial leaders to assess the state of advanced power and propulsion for space missions, as well as the outlook for a Department of Defense initiative known as Hybrid Space Architecture.
Input from the workshop will be combined with insights gained at two other workshops in Florida and New Mexico to help the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit produce its annual report about the space industry’s potential contributions to sustaining America’s leadership on the final frontier.
“There’s so much going on, at both big companies and small companies, and we figure that it’s about time that the government actually comes to you,” Steve “Bucky” Butow, director of DIU’s space portfolio, told more than 60 attendees during Tuesday’s opening session.
The topics being addressed at this week’s workshop play to two of the Pacific Northwest’s space industry strengths.
The Seattle area already produces more than half of the world’s satellites annually — largely thanks to SpaceX’s Starlink operation in Redmond, Wash., plus LeoStella in Tukwila and Xplore in Redmond. Meanwhile, Amazon’s Project Kuiper is gearing up to build thousands of satellites at a facility in Kirkland.
All those satellites could play a role in the Hybrid Space Infrastructure that DIU envisions. “In short, space internet,” Butow said. Microsoft Azure Space, Amazon Web Services and Project Kuiper are among DIU’s commercial partners in the space infrastructure project.
The region’s role in developing advanced propulsion and power systems might not be as well-known, but it’s arguably just as worthy of note.
“The Pacific Northwest is unique in the United States, in that it has aerospace and nuclear, all within the same region,” said Paolo Venneri, executive vice president for Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp’s Seattle-based tech division.
Washington state’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Idaho National Laboratory are both nuclear research hotspots, so to speak. And the Seattle area has more than its share of commercial nuclear ventures — ranging from TerraPower, the small-scale nuclear fission company founded by Bill Gates, to far-out fusion companies such as Helion Energy, Avalanche Energy and Zap Energy.
“You have this unique combination of workforce and talent that all touches on all these areas that we’re talking about, propulsion and nuclear. That’s principally why we’re here,” Venneri said.
USNC-Tech has won a string of government contracts to work on next-generation radioisotope batteries for spacecraft as well as nuclear thermal propulsion systems. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is a prominent partner.
Most of today’s satellites and spacecraft rely on solar arrays to provide in-space power — but when it comes to powering up far-out probes such as the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars, or the New Horizons spacecraft that flew past Pluto, nuclear batteries make more sense. USNC-Tech says its next-gen battery, known as EmberCore, should provide 10 times as much power as the Mars rovers’ batteries.
The need for nuclear is likely to increase as NASA and the Pentagon ramp up plans to place infrastructure in cislunar space — that is, the sphere of influence ranging from Earth to the moon.
“You’re able to put megawatts of power into a single spacecraft. You’re able to do things that are not just sensing, not passively observing what is happening around you. You’re able to do active missions on the surface in cislunar space, all because you have power,” Venneri said. “If you just want to sit there and explore with robots, do it with a battery pack. Easy. But if you want to have a permanent presence on the moon, if you want to have a permanent presence in cislunar space, you need to pack a punch with it.”
Lisa Rich, Xplore’s co-founder and chief operating officer, said advanced power systems could also give a boost to satellite operations in Earth orbit.
“The ability to have a lot of power on a satellite allows you to have multiple sensors on that satellite, and then use that power not only to gather data … but to get the processing taken care of and then download it,” she said. “So I think we’re at a really transformative time.”
So what’s next? Rich said space companies should join forces to address the industry’s technological challenges, ranging from the realm of power and propulsion to the rise of space-based networking. “We need companies to get bigger and stronger and to advance their capabilities,” she said. “So I really encourage collaboration in the space sector, for founders and technologists to find each other and say, ‘How can we be stronger together?’ Because as we look at the Hybrid Space Architecture, it means this network working together.”
When it comes to power and propulsion, there’s already something of a space race shaping up: Last year, Chinese news reports hinted at progress in developing a megawatt-scale nuclear reactor for space applications.
Venneri noted that the programs funded by the U.S. government typically call for in-space demonstrations of advanced power and propulsion systems within five years.
“If we buckle down and really commit to doing it, all these programs have a pathway to success,” he said. “So within the next five years, I would really like to see all of these having flight hardware in orbit demonstrating that the United States can develop and deploy space nuclear capabilities, which allows us to get to the next step — which is within the next 10 years — of actually deploying meaningful capabilities, not just demonstrations.”
Venneri envisions a time when the U.S. government or commercial ventures can draw up power purchase agreements for supporting operations on the moon.
“All that needs to happen pretty, pretty briskly,” he said. “Otherwise, someone else is going to do it before us.”
