In Moon Race with China, Duffy Wants Fission Surface Power

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy wants a nuclear fission reactor on the Moon to support sustained U.S. presence there. Asserting that the United States is in a Moon race with China, he insists that NASA must establish a base at the South Pole and “claim that for America.” Meanwhile, the chairmen of NASA’s House and Senate oversight committees wrote to Duffy today asking when and how he will spend the $10 billion Congress provided for NASA in the reconciliation bill that was enacted a month ago.

Duffy was confirmed as President Trump’s Secretary of Transportation, but Trump additionally assigned him as Acting Administrator of NASA on July 9. He withdrew his original nominee to be NASA Administrator and hasn’t named a replacement, but said Duffy’s tenure would be for a “short period of time.”

In remarks at Kennedy Space Center last week while attending Crew-11’s launch to the International Space Station, Duffy talked about the need to “claim” critical real estate on the Moon. The comment raised eyebrows because the Outer Space Treaty (OST) prohibits claims of national sovereignty in space, including on the Moon and other celestial bodies. The Artemis Accords developed during Trump’s first term that recently added its 56th member, Senegal, reinforces the commitment of signatory nations to the OST and other U.N. space agreements. U.S. law allows U.S. companies to own minerals and other materials they extract from celestial bodies, but not the celestial bodies themselves.

Duffy said the same thing today. During a Department of Transportation press conference on an unrelated issue (drones), he was asked about plans to accelerate development of a nuclear fission reactor for use on the lunar surface as first reported by Politico yesterday. (NASAWatch posted a copy of Duffy’s July 31 Fission Surface Power directive today.)

After stating “we’re in a race with China to the Moon” and confirming the fission surface reactor plans, he added “there’s a certain part of the Moon that everyone knows is the best” and “we want to get there first and claim that for America.”

In response to a query from SpacePolicyOnline.com as to whether he is signalling a change in U.S. policy, NASA replied: “Secretary Duffy’s use of the word ‘claim’ was meant in terms of claiming America’s continued position as the preeminent leader in space.”

Duffy’s reference to the “best” part of the Moon is the lunar South Pole. Some scientists believe ice exists in permanently shadowed regions that could be extracted and used to support a lunar outpost for astronauts conducting lunar exploration and utilization operations. All parts of the Moon experience 14 days of sunlight and 14 days of darkness (there is no “dark side” of the Moon) except at the poles where sun angles vary. Some locations always have sunlight and others always darkness, like the permanently shadowed craters, but by and large lunar surface operations have to take long periods of darkness into account.

Solar energy can be used for power and warmth to keep electronics from freezing when the sun is shining, but landers meant to operate continuously need storage devices or a different power source. Robotic lunar landers from the United States and Soviet Union in the 1960s and early 1970s, and by China more recently, rely on small radioisotope power sources. For the types of operations envisioned by the Artemis program, more powerful systems are needed.

NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE) have been developing Fission Surface Power for many years. Duffy’s directive gives the effort a major boost and calls for development of a 100 kilowatt (kWe) reactor instead of the 10 kWe Kilopower reactor and 40 kWe Fission Surface Power projects NASA and DOE have been working on so far. His comments today stressed the importance of winning the Moon race and putting nuclear reactors there.

Listen, this is not a new concept. This has been discussed under Trump One, under Biden, but we are in a race, we’re in a race to the Moon, in a race with China to the Moon. 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, and so we’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars studying can we do it? We are now going to move beyond studying and we are going, we have given direction to go. Let’s start to deploy our technology, to move, to actually make this a reality.

And I think the stat we have is 100 kilowatt output. That’s 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. We’re not launching this live, that’s obviously, if you have any questions about that, no, we’re not launching it live [activated].

But again, energy is important and if we’re going to be able to sustain life on the Moon, to then go to Mars, this technology is critically important. And I would just note that we’re behind, right? If we’re going to engage in a race to the Moon and the race to Mars, we have to get our act together. We have to marshall all of our resources, all of our focus on going to the Moon, which is what we are going to do.

And, again, there’s a lot of things that NASA does and a lot of people love a lot of things that NASA does, but this is about space exploration and this is about this next phase. A lot of people don’t know even what Artemis is. Everyone knew what Apollo was. We all knew. The whole world knew what Apollo was. We were going to the Moon.

Artemis is:  we’re going back. So in the first part of next year we are going to send Artemis II out. Met the four astronauts. They’re fantastic. We’re going to go out around the Moon and come back. Artemis III we are going to go back to the Moon. We’re going to land. The longest time we spent in the past was three days. We’re going to stay for six days. And then after that we’re able to start shipping our assets to the Moon unmanned. And we’ll have those assets there as our astronauts arrive. We’re able to build a base.

But this is critically important. There’s a certain part of the Moon that everyone knows is the best. We have ice there. We have sunlight there. We want to get there first and claim that for America. And to do this, this part of the fission technology is critically important to sustain life, because solar won’t do it. But it’s just a lower amount of that fission technology that’s going to allow human life to sustain. —  Sean Duffy

Duffy posted a photo of his meeting with the Artemis II astronauts on his @SecDuffyNASA account on X. L-R: Jeremy Hansen (Canadian Space Agency); Christina Koch (NASA); Secretary Duffy; Victor Glover (NASA); Reid Wiseman (NASA).

Every milestone in the Artemis campaign brings us closer to landing Americans back on the Moon and pushing onward to Mars.

In about six months, Artemis II astronauts will journey around the Moon for the first time in 53 years. America rallied behind Apollo because it… pic.twitter.com/MT8Gv3pNlw

— NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy (@SecDuffyNASA) August 4, 2025

Getting American astronauts back on the Moon before China puts taikonauts there has been a top priority for Republicans and Democrats for many years. The first Trump Administration restored the Moon as a pathway to Mars after President Barack Obama eschewed the Moon because he thought putting astronauts in orbit around Mars was a higher priority.  During his first term in the White House, Trump initiated the Artemis program and President Joe Biden continued it.

Now in his second term, Trump still supports Artemis, but he’s proposed a 24.3 percent cut to NASA’s budget from $24.8 billion in FY2025 to $18.8 billion in FY2026. It would stay there with no adjustment for inflation through 2030. Human exploration of the Moon and Mars is the only sector of the NASA budget that gets an increase in the budget request, although the direction it will take after Artemis III is unclear. NASA planned to continue using the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft for future Artemis missions, but the Trump Administration wants to terminate SLS/Orion after Artemis III and replace them with commercial systems that do not yet exist.

The House and Senate appropriations committees disagree with the Trump Administration proposal both to drastically cut NASA’s budget and to terminate SLS and Orion so quickly. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), also known as the reconciliation bill, similarly calls for SLS and Orion to continue for at least two more missions (Artemis IV and Artemis V).

The OBBBA already has been enacted. Trump signed the bill into law on July 4. Of the $10 billion allocated for NASA, $4.1 billion is for SLS and $20 million for Orion. It also includes $2.6 billion to build Artemis’s lunar Gateway space station that the Trump Administration wants to kill.

Today the chairmen of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), wrote to Duffy asking for details on when and how the NASA money will be spent. They called for “timely release” of the money, saying: “It has now been more than a month since President Trump signed OBBBA into law and a little less than two months away from the end of the fiscal year. With each passing day, NASA risks falling behind and failing to achieve the objectives of the nearly $10 billion provided by Congress in the OBBBA.”