Space Policy Edition: Is this the moment for in-space nuclear power?

Casey Dreier: Hello and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreier, the Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society. Thank you for joining me. I'm very excited about my guest this month. She has been on the show before, I think a couple of times. I consider her one of the most insightful and thoughtful and interesting minds working in space policy today. Of course, I'm talking about Dr. Bhavya Lal. She was the first Associate Administrator of the Office of Technology Policy and Strategy, an office she helped design. Prior to that, she worked at the Science and Technology Policy Institute and she is now the professor of Policy Analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy. She is here to talk about a new paper, a new report that she co-authored with Roger Myers on in-space nuclear power called Weighing the Future: Strategic Options for US Space Nuclear Leadership. 

This is a fascinating report that unlike a lot of reports, actually says something, and says something interesting and lays out real pathways for after identifying a problem for in-space nuclear power, provide some serious and very thoughtful paths forward and really reframes some of the questions about why we need this. So the idea that power is not just a issue of propulsion, which is how it's often framed, but that nuclear power is the thing about power, the enabling aspect of literally everything you do in space. For those of you who are excited to watch Apollo 13's 30th anniversary coming out this year, you may remember the role of power in that movie of keeping the astronauts alive on the way back from the Moon. It's pretty much everything. 

There's not a lot of power in space, honestly, and for the longest time, most spacecraft have had to work with not very much, on the order of light bulbs or computers, home computers, but definitely nothing like the very high-intensive power needs that will be required to enable things like industry, maybe advanced AI on spacecraft, processing, construction, life support, in-situ resource utilization, you name it. Anything that spins a big motor needs lots of power. And in places that have lots of darkness like the Moon, two weeks of nighttime or Mars, where you have large dust storms that blanket the sun or even in just deep space where you can't depend on solar panels when the sun is just barely brighter than some of the other stars in the sky, you'll need something else. And Bhavya argues that that is nuclear. It's a very interesting discussion. She'll be on shortly. 

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Bhavya Lal: I'm expecting this will be the best one hour of the year.

Casey Dreier: The year. Bhavya, before we get into the really fascinating report that you and your co-author Roger Myers just released called Weighing the Future: Strategic Options for US Space Nuclear Leadership, I had a thought that I realized I've never asked you before, which is, in addition to being an expert in public policy, your background from MIT and education is in nuclear engineering. What drew you to nuclear? I mean, that's not a huge field. It doesn't sound like an easy field to get in. What drew you to nuclear engineering? Is it the science and the process of how this stuff works to begin with or is there something else that pulled you into this field?

Bhavya Lal: Casey, I wish I had a lofty answer for you. I was 18 years old. I wasn't thinking a whole lot. A lot of the smartest people I knew were nuclear engineers. So I came to MIT as an undergraduate from India and some of the smartest people I knew, people like Mike Houtz and others who were actually in the space sector today, were nuclear engineers. And I said, "Oh, I want to do what he does. I want to put nuclear reactors in space." And that's kind of where it all started. Although obviously, my initial word, nuclear engineering wasn't space. It is only much later in my career that I have returned to space. So it's like coming home for me, but it's just something that brings together doing good for humanity, doing something hard, doing something important. But at the time, it was a simple reason.

Casey Dreier: I like that. I certainly when I was 18, probably would not have accidentally drifted into nuclear engineering. That speaks a lot to your skillset and capabilities at the time. But I mean, it is a fascinating field. I always did like nuclear physics in terms of the transmutation of elements functionally, right? And that it's so new and powerful, but also it's gone through such a complex cultural relationship with it, particularly in the United States. Did you feel that when you were studying the field? Was that something that was in your mind that nuclear kind of has this mixed or uncertain or somewhat weary viewpoint from large sections of the public based on Chernobyl and other accidents throughout the world?

Bhavya Lal: Yeah, so two things happened, Casey, right in my freshman year. The Chernobyl disaster was my freshman year, I think 1986, as was Challenger. So my freshman year right away was shaped by accidents and mishaps, and it took me a while to figure that out. In fact, I did a whole undergraduate, had a master's degree in nuclear engineering before I switched to a second master's in technology and policy. But the realization was that a lot of our challenges aren't really challenges of technology. They are challenges of policy and there are where we have levers that are just as big as the levers in technology and that was the big change that came about as a result of me being there, watching these two big accidents that change the course of technology development.

Casey Dreier: Do you think that in-space nuclear is the fortunes for that are functionally or fundamentally related to the fortunes of terrestrial nuclear? Because you mentioned policy in Chernobyl, it seems like, and again I was young at the time, so I didn't necessarily see the shift. But that seems like it had a fundamental shift in terms of the ability to stand up new nuclear power systems, that the reaction may have been overwrought or is applicable or needs to be reconsidered. We have this as a modern resurgence of interest in nuclear, but I have not yet seen any changes in regulatory requirements for nuclear energy, which seemed to be the big issue of standing up new power generation on earth. Is that an accurate description from your perspective of what happened and what the challenges here on earth for deploying these are, and how do you see that intersecting with what we do in space with our power generation?

Bhavya Lal: You are correct in that they are highly connected or they're seen as highly connected, but I think that is probably problematic because we really ought not to apply earth-based nuclear safety framework to space systems. A space nuclear reactor when it's launched is launched cold and inert, which means there is no fission products in a reactor that is being launched. And so if there is, worst case scenario, an explosion, there is no radioactivity that is going to get spilled. Second difference is that nuclear reactor in space is going to operate thousands of miles above earth in fact, millions of miles away from earth and it is going to be nowhere near water tables, ecosystems, or civilian populations. 

So there really is no reason for the frameworks that are used for regulating earth systems to be applied to space systems. And we don't ask those the same questions of hydrazine tanks or liquid methane or massive cryogenic systems, all of which can and do explode. I mean, just a few months ago a methane-fueled Starship exploded all over the ocean, scattering debris and vapor, yet faced fewer regulatory hurdles and a fission-free fresh core nuclear launch that I just talked about. And I think it's because the regulatory system we have is built around terrestrial analogs and that's something that needs to change. Space nuclear ought to be treated differently than earth's nuclear for these reasons.

Casey Dreier: Have you seen any serious attempt to modify the regulatory structure of nuclear systems or even address specifics of space nuclear systems in your lifetime? Is there just a too high bar or if there isn't, what is preventing that from trying to address these particulars?

Bhavya Lal: So actually, there has been change. So in, I think, 2020, 2021, we had National Security Presidential Memorandum-20, NSPM-20 come out of the White House. And it was an enormous break from previous regulation of space nuclear systems, which was, I think, called PD/NSC-25. And the big difference was that NSPM-20 divided risk in tiers. If you're going to launch a highly enriched uranium nuclear reactor, you are in the topmost tier where you need presidential approval. However, if you're launching a few grams of a radioisotope heating unit, a RHU that keeps instruments warm on a spacecraft going into deep space, you are in the lowest tier where the approval can come just from your agency itself. 

So that was a huge shift from how we used to regulate nuclear. Before where it was a one-size-fits-all, whether you had tens of kilograms of plutonium-238 like in the Cassini mission or a few tens of grams of plutonium-238 that was in a RHU, same bar, same level of safety analysis, same tens of millions of dollar that was spent. So NSPM-20 changed that. Another change that was made in NSPM-20 was it allowed, it made a pathway for commercial, space nuclear companies. And since NSPM-20, we've actually seen multiple companies that want to do space nuclear work because of that change. 

So yes, to your question, we have had regulatory changes that have made space nuclear more normalized and we need more of that. For example, right now on earth, there is a liability regime where if there is an incident, there is availability of what's called indemnification. We don't have any such thing for space launches and we would need to have something like that, whether it's private liability or government liability coverage, we need that. So a lot has been done, but a lot more remains to be done.

Casey Dreier: And just to clarify, indemnification would be the company or who provides the service would not necessarily be financially liable for a large accident?

Bhavya Lal: Well, I mean it depends on the scenario, but they're not liable over a certain limit. We don't want to make companies that are behaving badly go scot-free, but if it is shown that there was an unforeseen event above a certain level, the government can take a very similar to the Price-Anderson Act for terrestrial American commercial power plants.

Casey Dreier: We should probably start talking about the paper itself. We're jumping a little bit ahead of it, but it is really fascinating and I just give credit to you and again, your co-author Roger Myers. Writing something that I think is, I've read a lot of reports over the years as you have, and it's certainly refreshing to see a report that says something actually clearly and gives real concrete outcomes. So I compliment you both for that. It was very refreshing to read this and I recommend our listeners read it too. It's very readable as well. But you and your co-authors say that the 2020s, this decade, is a decisive decade for in-space nuclear power. Why is that?

Bhavya Lal: For lots of reasons. One of them is that for the first time ever, ever, we've actually had mission pull. So part of what we did in this report, Casey was, we tried to develop an actual strategy. Most strategies end up being visionary documents. You lay out a grand plan. What we wanted to do was not write another vision list or a wish list or a consensus roadmap, not another a hundred-page study that just makes everyone happy and ends up doing nothing. We went back to first principles. We decided we'd start with what is the crux of the problem? Why have we not been able to do this despite 60 years of investment? And then of course, we offer a guiding policy to solve it and then lay out a coherent set of actions. And one of the problems we found was that we've never had a mission pull. And one reason technology doesn't develop is, nobody wants it. 

So for the first time, we have a mission pull NASA and an official white paper in November 2024, laid out that it would like to have a fission reactor for the surface of Mars, the primary power source for Mars surface power. And again, as a side point, unlike power, NASA has deferred a decision on propulsion stating formally as late as April of this year, 2025, that it continues to evaluate transit options to Mars. And it has not done a down select between all chemical neutral thermal propulsion, neutral electric propulsion and solar electric propulsion. A second point, which kind of goes directly to the heart of what you're talking about, why this decade, there is a geopolitical urgency that we haven't had before. 

China and Russia are developing a joint megawatt-class reactor. They're planning a nuclear-powered lunar base. And the interesting difference here from some of the other things that the Russians or the Chinese can be doing on the Moon is that a continuously operating reactor on the lunar South Pole, let's say, would create de facto territorial control. And in fact, it could justify exclusion zones under the guise of safety and they legitimately be able to do that. And what this does is, they can redefine norms. They can force consultations before others can land nearby. This stills the table of power in space as on earth, first movers make the law. 

So having a reactor on the Moon isn't the same thing as having the first Americans land back on the Moon. This kind of changes the balance of power in more substantive ways because it isn't a one-off. It's enduring continuous presence. And then other things are in play as well. One of them is that we actually not only have a private demand, there are companies that would like to see nuclear power on the Moon and actually on Mars doing things they want to do. So there's a demand side, but there's also a supply side. There's private companies that are willing to invest to launch space nuclear reactors. So there's a whole bunch of things that have happened that have left this convergence that we have a small window where we can actually do something big and fast.

Casey Dreier: I want to just go through some of those kind of in sequence because particularly the strategic and presence at the lunar surface, which I thought was a novel argument that I had not seen before. But let's start just to real quickly separate it. You said something that we should just emphasize here, that there's a distinction between nuclear in-space power and propulsion. Can you just do a quick 60-second summary of the distinction of what you mean by that?

Bhavya Lal: Okay, so just technically, power is just you make electricity, you power things. Propulsion is how you get some places, right? And amongst propulsion, there's two approaches. There's nuclear thermal propulsion, which is basically like chemical propulsion, except you've separated the heat source from the propellant. So you heat the propellant using a nuclear power reactor and out goes hydrogen at the back. And since it is the lightest molecule we know, you can get very high levels of specific impulse. Nuclear electric propulsion is basically building on the power reactor. You just bolt it on electric thrusters and you can move. So those are the big differences. 

But in terms of the mission pull I just mentioned, NASA has specifically asked for a power reactor on Mars and the Moon, and NASA has specifically gone out of its way to say that it does not want propulsion, it does not want a nuclear propulsion approach because they are still working for the down select. Interestingly, Casey, Congress asked the Department of Defense, they asked Space Force, do you want to have nuclear propulsion options for doing DoD things? And interestingly, DoD also said that they are monitoring developments. They offered a very cautious and noncommittal reply saying that once the technology is mature, and again I'll quote here, "S&P technology space, nuclear propulsion technologies, will be considered through the force design and requirements generation process as potential options to fulfill operational requirements." So a lot of sort of weasel words, I like to say.

Casey Dreier: DoD speech. Yeah.

Bhavya Lal: Yes. So this is really interesting. Decision makers are saying, we want X, and they're saying, we are not ready for Y. So to me in my mind it's like a no-brainer that if somebody wants X, and again there's other reasons X is good as in maybe it's depending on how you design it, it's less expensive to develop, more useful, it has broader category users, so let's develop X and let's maybe invest in Y also. Let's also invest in propulsion, but let's really focus on power. And I think in the past what we've done is, we like to make everyone happy. A space, people are very, we are egalitarian, we like each other, so everybody gets a little bit of money, everybody's happy. But of course, with this peanut and butter spread, you don't get anywhere. 

So what we are saying in this report is, let's prioritize, let's sequence, let's start with power and then move on from there to propulsion. And of course, there's lots of commonalities. Investing in power by definition is also investing in propulsion. Obviously, there's some parts of propulsion that we will not get by investing in power, in particular, ground test facilities. That is one of the biggest bottlenecks for us getting to the next level of nuclear thermal propulsion, at least. So we need to invest separately in propulsion as well, but let's prioritize power. Let's do what we call in the report some strategic sequencing and launch a reactor, land it, generate power and make a difference.

Casey Dreier: Okay, so I'm going to put to the side the China Russia thing just for a second because this whole thing about sequencing and power versus propulsion, there's so much wrapped up in this that I'm fascinated by. Bhavya, you were on this show, what, five years ago, I think, if not more, longer ago, talking about another report you were on about nuclear propulsion. And there does seem to be a political, as you said, kind of smear of resources being put to thermal versus electric and this decision between the two. And I think this inversion of that to focus on power and reframing nuclear as a power source rather than a primarily propulsion element is one of the more, I think, clever and important decisions you and your author make in this report. But I'm just fascinated by this. So I mean you have this idea of nuclear propulsion just to focus on this for a second. That has been around a long time. 

And I think, to me, again, not as an expert in this space, nuclear field, it does seem like propulsion was the primary motivator and point of discussion for a long time. I did some cursory research and you can find references to atomic rockets going all the way back to early 20th century and this kind of cultural era when we did enter the nuclear age in the mid 20th century, this idea, oh of course we'll have nuclear rockets because we'll have nuclear power for everything. But it sounds like they're not actually super useful, I guess, is that the right way to put it, ultimately? Again, Space Force does say it doesn't need them. They'd be helpful from Mars, but clearly, they're not required to go to Mars and almost by the de facto outcome that, it's not just that NASA hasn't done this, no one else has really fielded a viable nuclear propulsion system either, right? No other nation. Did we have it backwards this whole time? Why were we focusing so much on propulsion if it was really trying to, as you said, there wasn't a mission pull, there's nothing required to justify it.

Bhavya Lal: Yeah, so that's such an interesting idea, Casey, sort of space was about heroic leaps and bold trajectories and human led missions that had to get somewhere fast. So it was sort of an escape hatch from the limits of chemical rockets of the time. And actually, maybe because computing was primitive and there was no such thing as autonomy, the idea of long duration power rich robotic systems operating far from earth was just not possible. But I think that worldview has changed. The bottlenecks today aren't just about getting places and they're about staying there and doing useful things once we've arrived, and scaling our presence over time. And I think that's where power comes in. I think the reason, and again, this is not at all how we were thinking in our report, but now that you mentioned this, I can see that you reframe to power because propulsion solves getting there problem, while power solves the being there problem. 

So like you said, you can reach Mars with chemical propulsion, but you can't sustain human life, enable ISRU, build infrastructure or even do science without abundant reliable energy. Power is, in a way, that enabler of permanence. But I do want to emphasize that this isn't about abandoning propulsion and because we do need to get there, right? All we are saying is that it's about sequencing. Let's build the muscle, the infrastructure, the institutions around space nuclear that we can deliver. Starting with power, it gives us a demand signal, a deployable demo and the foundation for the future. And again, it is truly not one or the other, but in a zero-sum game, which is where we are at, it is also not both. We just need to sequence, one before the other.

Casey Dreier: But again, I think it's so, it's interesting then that the promise of propulsion though, really comes down to the fact that there's a theoretical technology that could be so much better but really isn't good enough to justify the uncertainty of getting there, in terms of developing it and fielding it. And it's almost, I wonder, as something this complex and expensive, if there is no clear national security need for it, it's very difficult to push that uphill through non, in a sense, existential motivations in the political, in a public policy system. 

You brought up one of my kind of pet theories a bit, which is this, so much of, I think of our, what defines a lot of space culture to this day is kind of a ossified remnants of the mid-twentieth century when space really kind of embedded itself about what the future was and yes, this kind of pre-compute era before... You look at those early Collier's magazines, which I actually recommend, that's one of the first things I recommend when I ever have an intern or a student or somebody that I work with who's learning space history, to kind of ground themselves in what space was being presented as before it became of an actual real-world existence. 

And there are humans everywhere. You have humans holding giant telescopes looking down at the earth to provide weather observations. The idea that that would be done autonomously wasn't either futuristic enough or just so futuristic and infeasible to not be even credible. You had humans floating around doing all the repairs in earth or to drop atomic bombs from space stations and none of that was actually viable because you can do all of those much more cheaply, enabling reliably and effectively with robotics because the computing was actually the big revolution that no one saw. Bhavya, have you read, Of a Fire on the Moon, about the history of the Apollo program from Norman Mailer?

Bhavya Lal: I have not read that one.

Casey Dreier: It's a fascinating book because he's writing as a non-expert, but as someone who is feeling like he is seeing the future presented to him and it's contemporaneous with the launch of Apollo 11, and he was kind of a gonzo journalist type who has a bunch of other crazy stuff in there too. But what was fascinating is that I remember reading this and saying, they thought the future was going to be Apollo, but the actual future I felt like, was hidden in the command module, the computer, right? 

And that's what actually revolutionized all of our lives, was the computer and then the communications between computers that came out of that, but that was hidden from them at the time. It kind of helps put me back in that expectation of so much of what we extrapolate forward as linear from our experience. And we have a really hard time seeing jumps like this, and this is a long way of going around to saying, I wonder if that's why this fixation has been on propulsion, as you said, is because people are going to be required. You need to get them to places faster without much thought about what you do when you get there.

Bhavya Lal: Yeah. No, I agree with you and it makes a lot of sense, Casey, but for those of us who grew up on Star Trek, I don't know, I wouldn't be able to say how many episodes, you landed on some planet and there was a power source. So many of the Star Treks were about a power source,

Casey Dreier: Uh-huh.

Bhavya Lal: And most of the time, the power source was evil, but sometimes, it was good. And also, I want to mention one other piece of history. I mean, we started investing in space nuclear about the same time we started investing in both space and nuclear, right?

Casey Dreier: Mm-hmm.

Bhavya Lal: So all three at the same time. And the only nuclear we have ever launched is a power reactor. So the SNAP-10A was launched in 1965. It even had thrusters on it to test out nuclear electric propulsion. So while I think propulsion may have gotten the big bucks, we actually have fielded power and that is kind of the sad thing, right? Something that we did back in 1965, somehow we aren't able to do again. And again, you might say the same thing about Apollo as well, right? I mean, we landed in 1969. Why can't we do it again? Why? What's the problem?

Casey Dreier: We'll be right back with the rest of our Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio after this short break.

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Casey Dreier: Let's go back to this power issue because again, so my digression to the side, power is everything. And I think it's worth really kind of just emphasizing here, what I frame here as the power deprivation mindset that drives spacecraft. I remember very vividly when I learned that the curiosity now, Perseverance rovers, these big complex projects on the surface of Mars powered by plutonium-238, a radioisotopic from heat generation, from a radioactive decay, they are roughly at a hundred-ish watts. Watts, right? Like an old-school light bulb to run that whole thing. That's nothing. And that's what a lot of space engineers have to work with on spacecraft, right? This constant minimization of power usage, which just, I imagine, just really limits what you can do in space.

Bhavya Lal: That's exactly right. And again, let me give some examples on that. The Huygens mission to Titan, it cost more than $660 million. It was a European mission. It had no more than three hours of battery life, most of which was used up during descent and I think they got maybe 30 minutes of data from the surface.

Casey Dreier: Mm-hmm.

Bhavya Lal: The Philae lander, again, tens of millions of hundreds of millions of dollars, went into hibernation after 60 hours of operation on landing on, I think, 67P/C-G and never operated again. I mean, my favorite example is New Horizons. It cost $700 million. It whizzed past Pluto because it had no ability to go into orbit. We got, I think, 24 hours worth of data. It was basically putting a one-shot camera on a bullet. And to your point, we got used to it. I mean, just imagine if we could flip that. So let's say, the New Horizons had a NEP system in a 20 kilowatts. It could go into orbit, right? It could power all the instruments continuously, streamed high bandwidth data in real time, deploy atmospheric or surface probes, and operate as a multi-year observatory for Pluto and the Kuiper belt, right? 

And instead, what we got was, I think, one megabit per second data back in over a year. So you are correct that somehow, we have started to treat these constraints as our goals. And I think what having high-density power will do is flip that for us. I mean, a good example of power abundance, the opposite of what you said, power react from the moon of 4,200 kilowatt FSB system will allow continuous operations through the lunar night. It'll allow for oxygen production from regolith, it will power mobility systems, construction platforms. It'll allow for real infrastructure buildup, which is basically the difference between [inaudible 00:34:45] and a settlement. So your point of, well taken, and I think we break that paradigm with having high-density power sources like nuclear.

Casey Dreier: Right. I mean, and that's why I think it's so important that this inversion of focusing on nuclear as a source of power first because it is a insanely enabling capability when you no longer have to be limited. Again, we're talking about, for some of these spacecraft, a hundred or fewer watts to work with. And so, you have a battery and of course, then you have other limitations with it. Talking about in-situ resource utilization, MOXIE the little demonstration to create oxygen on Mars around a Perseverance. I think you had to basically shut down the rest of the rover for a day or two to run one little test on that because of the power consumption, right? You're an engineer, right? Anytime you take a direct current and create motion with it, I feel like is really inefficient. You give off tons of excess heat. 

So if you want, what do you need to create motion? Things that build stuff, right? Industry construction, utilization of materials, basically anything that is this future space economy people are talking about, is going to need tons of power. And I see lots of interesting parallels. We're seeing this here on earth right now with not just growing AI systems, but power being one of the key critical enabling capabilities of future economies and seeing which nations are able to build out power grids and power generation to enable these types of future activities. Everything is going to be power hungry. And if you want to do advanced things in space, you're not going to do it on a hundred watts.

Bhavya Lal: That's exactly right. I mean, you mentioned MOXIE so, and if you take our [inaudible 00:36:24] to Mars plan, we are not going to be able to come back from Mars without actually generating propellant on the surface of Mars using, I'm assuming some very highly scaled up version of MOXIE. We are going to need about 750 kilowatts to two megawatts generated on the surface of Mars. If you do it with solar, and again, remember solar, 50 to 60% less solar flux on the surface of Mars, then Earth orbit, we are going to need 14 football fields worth of solar panels. And we lost, was it curiosity or [inaudible 00:36:59] opportunity because of a dust storm, a Martian dust storm. Imagine how hard it is going to be for us to generate power on Mars with solar to produce propellant, as compared with 40 kilowatt nuclear reactor or daisy chained multiple nuclear reactors to the same and much less surface areas and volumes.

Casey Dreier: I mean, it could be the difference of life and death. This isn't about dust on the solar panels. This is about dust in the sky, where you were talking about, right? Opportunity died because it was a multi-month dust storm where the actual amount of solar radiation dropped by something like 90%, just like some insane level. And so nothing-

Bhavya Lal: That's right.

Casey Dreier: ... you could do if you depended on solar. You'd basically be dead probably. Do you see this kind of reframing taking hold, has that helped... You just released this process, but framing it this way as an enabling capability for literally everything we want to do, do you think that breaks through this, as you said, this artifice of propulsion being the only viable utility of nuclear?

Bhavya Lal: I think, I mean, our report just came out and we are starting to refit around and getting a huge amount of traction and that's important. So I think to your point, it is a mental model that needs to be changed. And again, we want to be clear that we are not saying power or propulsion, we are just saying power leads to propulsion. And there are reasons other than just a mission that makes us invest in propulsion. I mean, over time, this has become a parochial thing as well, right?

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Bhavya Lal: Just this, we, last week, they're both house and senate markups on propulsion and literally zero money for fission surface power, which is a stated priority of NASA. And I think I added up on the house side, it's, I think, 255 million or maybe 355 million for propulsion. Even the NASA has clearly, in no uncertain terms said, we are not ready to pick a propulsion option.

Casey Dreier: Right.

Bhavya Lal: So we are not investing in propulsion for mission reasons, it's other reasons.

Casey Dreier: Well, that's what I think that kind of cultural inertia or history comes in because a lot of that's tied to, I think, Marshall Space Flight Center being a propulsion centric, and these are primarily Alabama representatives directing this money for nuclear thermal, which is done at Marshall, that there's no NASA center that specializes in power generation, right? Because it's kind of the newer concept. You worked at NASA, so maybe you can correct me on that. But as far as I would conceptualize this, the legacy institutional histories have this very powerful pull for how they kind of draw, $200 million is a lot of money, but in the scope of even what NASA spends, it's small enough to kind of be tossed around like this. So there's no institutional establishment that pulls that kind of expertise, power and parochial interest. There's the opposite, which is what we just saw, as you said, in terms of propulsion.

Bhavya Lal: So you're not completely correct, Casey in that-

Casey Dreier: Okay.

Bhavya Lal: ... the Glenn Research Center in Ohio actually does specialize in power, but I think maybe-

Casey Dreier: [inaudible 00:40:23] radioisotopes, so I guess is that different enough or no?

Bhavya Lal: No, no, no. They do RPS and they do also fission power.

Casey Dreier: Okay.

Bhavya Lal: Including power conversion, so Stirling-Brayton power conversion engine. So yeah, so I know Glenn is a power center, but I think maybe your overarching point is correct, in that power is more distributed because we need power for everything, whereas propulsion is a specific area that is centered at Marshall. I think the more likely reason is that those in power are more inclined to send money to other [inaudible 00:41:00].

Casey Dreier: They have more, better representation on the Appropriations Committees than Ohio does at the moment. Yes.

Bhavya Lal: Yes. Thank you for saying that. I was struggling to find a way to say it. [inaudible 00:41:11].

Casey Dreier: Yeah, I mean, I think there is, I've been doing, well, preview this, but doing a little bit of research on the presence of various NASA centers in the Appropriations Committees over time. I think that is an interesting aspect of this. I want to circle back to something that you said about the strategic aspect of this. So let's just put this power aspect to the side. You mentioned that China and Russia have stated a goal to have a 1.5 megawatt, that's substantial, generator on the surface of the Moon, which would imply that they could put exclusion zones for safety. So before we even talk about the details of that, does this imply that... Is this an American problem that we're having of properly investing in-space nuclear power? Are other nations able to marshal and field more advanced or more focused programs in this or is this a radical new direction that we're seeing, coming from China and Russia?

Bhavya Lal: I think for China, they just appear to have a fulsome space program and they are probably investing in NEP and NTP as well. They're obviously talking about a moon base, ILRS. They were talking about planetary defense, they're talking about going out to the outer solar system. They're talking about Mars sample returns. So I think they just have a well-designed space nuclear program, and it seems that they're not as financially constrained as we are at the moment. So they're not having to make as many choices. I don't think they're necessarily emphasizing a nuclear reactor over other things.

Casey Dreier: But it's more the technology though. I mean, are they already fielding nuclear in-space capabilities that we know of or is this a novel development program for them, as far as [inaudible 00:42:55]?

Bhavya Lal: As I think they have been, no, best I can tell, they do not have a nuclear reactor in space. And actually, the only country other than the United States that has launched a nuclear reactor is Russia, former Soviet Union, and they launched more than 30 reactors over 20 years. So they know how to design, launch and operate space nuclear reactors better than anyone else.

Casey Dreier: You had a great story in the report itself about why they were doing it and it was driven by power needs to observe US, was it US naval deployments using-

Bhavya Lal: That's correct.

Casey Dreier: ... high powered radar?

Bhavya Lal: That's exactly right. And I was using that example to make, we keep getting asked the question, why haven't we done this already? And truly the short answer is, in the past, we haven't had to. Had we had to, we may have done it. I mean, you know, Manhattan Project, we went from discovering fission to developing a bomb in, I think, less than seven years because the choice was either that or speaking German.

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Bhavya Lal: So it was an existential risk and we did it. And same with Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine. I mean, the American Nuclear Navy is an outstanding, the safest in the world, not a single accident in, I don't know, 60, 70 years because there is a reason. We needed a nuclear navy that was part of the nuclear triad and so we did it. And the Russians, again, had no choice. They had to follow our movements on the oceans. They did not have the solar panel technology, radars needed more power. So they had to inoperate lower orbits where there was more drags. So they have to have nuclear. So they developed and they deployed. And I think that's also the distinction between enhancing and enabling. So if you only talk about nuclear as enhancing capabilities, they are much easier to kill because there's other options. Whereas if it's something that only nuclear can do and nothing else, then you're much more likely to start something and take it to completion.

Casey Dreier: So build out again this scenario where China and Russia deploy a 1.5 Megawatt reactor on the lunar surface. Why would that act as a de facto territorial claim or at least through the exercise of various exclusion zones and norm setting?

Bhavya Lal: I mean, just naturally, when you have a nuclear power plant, you need to have safety zones. That's the same reason we have safety zones. I mean, nuclear power plants on Earth have walls around them and you don't go in unless there's some reason, unless you have a license, you are a nuclear worker, that sort of thing.

Casey Dreier: But is that safety zone as a consequence though that you could cause harm to the environment or people? So I mean, on the Moon, would that be a viable argument?

Bhavya Lal: Well, you could get a radiation dose, right?

Casey Dreier: Yeah.

Bhavya Lal: You could go and you could be too close to a reactor that is, in principle, leaking. And again, this isn't, I mean, these reactors don't leak. They're sufficiently small and well enough design, and I'm sure new Chinese reactors are probably going to be just as well-designed as American ones, but it gives a legitimate reason to stay out.

Casey Dreier: Mm-hmm.

Bhavya Lal: And you cannot, if you land humans, it's a one-off thing, right? You landed a human, you went away. That land is there for someone else to land on and you cannot claim any zone. Whereas with a reactor, it's continuous, it's operating. You do need to have a keep out zone, and it just makes it very easy to have an exclusion area.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, it's not environmental consequence, but just your own astronaut's safety. Radiation doesn't require air as a medium.

Bhavya Lal: Right.

Casey Dreier: ... to transport, right? Yeah.

Bhavya Lal: And also, you don't want to disrupt operations, right? I mean, they may be using it to operate a, I don't know, facility, and you do not want the reactor accidentally being shut off.

Casey Dreier: Right. So suddenly, you have a situation where if you deploy one of those first that through this exclusion zone and through safety protocols, you're creating a functional series of territorial, at least, if not outright claims, areas of responsibility that others can't have ready access to. Would that strictly violate the Outer Space Treaty, understanding that there's no space police that'll come in and kick your door down and arrest the Xi Jinping or something for doing that. But would that be seen as an explicit violation or is that in enough of a gray area where you can't actually claim something like that?

Bhavya Lal: In fact, not only does it not violate the treaty, it actually may be a requirement of the treaty to create consultations, right? So yeah, no, it would be a very legitimate way to exclude other entities from some part of the Moon.

Casey Dreier: In your judgment, how feasible do you think this is, that this is a reality, that we will see this in the next 10 years or how seriously should we take it, maybe is a better way of [inaudible 00:48:19].

Bhavya Lal: I think we should absolutely seriously take the fact that China is developing a powerful space program. They want to be leaders, and this is just part of being a leader. I don't think they're necessarily doing it for any nefarious purposes, necessarily. I should underline that. I mean, they're using the same kind of logic that we just did, right? Nuc power is core to what you do in space, and I'm not really sure that they will start with 1.5 megawatts. Maybe they'll start small too. And again, there is no way for us to really know where development is at right now, although there's a lot of research papers. And based on my reading of the papers and the reading of colleagues of mine who are more experts in this than I am, they are a very good trajectory.

Casey Dreier: So you and your colleague propose a path and an approach to rapidly deploying and improving US capability for in-space nuclear. You say it hinges on three non-negotiable pillars, which I like, technology maturation, infrastructure improvements, and obviously, regulatory reform. But you also kind of give three ways this could go in terms of how much rapid investment the US would want to throw at it. Can you cover, and I like the names of them, so [inaudible 00:49:40]. Could you talk to me about the three paths that you propose for how the US could rapidly pursue this effort?

Bhavya Lal: Yes. The first path is what we call, go big or go home. It is transformational capability. It could be power or it could even be a nuclear electric propulsion, an NEP flight demo. And 2030, that deadline, we saw a flight by 2030 and a ground test by 2028. And the reason for that is, matching political timelines, and if you want leadership to invest in something, doing it in their regime makes it easier for them to invest heavily. So that's kind of where those dates came from. So that's a 100 to 500 kilowatt-class power or NEP system. 

It could be led by NASA, it could be led by DoD, with DOE as a partner, since that's where a lot of the nuclear capabilities are. Our estimate is that it's about $3 billion over five years. And obviously, it demands extraordinary alignment and resources. In fact, we actually call it the Manhattan Project Test, which is, is there a centralized lead with real budget and milestone authority? Are there stable multi-year large sums of money involved? And is there a strategic imperative that is so strong that it aligns leadership across the aisle and unlocks institutional will? So that's our option one. 

Option two is, if this funding level and this level of extraordinary alignment is absent, we can pursue a smaller power-only pathway where we propose two parallel public-private partnerships, one led by NASA, which is for surface power, one led by DoD, which is for in-space power. And what's unique about these partnerships is, and the fact that they're milestone-based or fixed price isn't that unique. What's unique about the partnerships is that the government remains technology-agnostic. So there's heated debate in the community that we heard was, do we use highly-enriched uranium or low-enriched uranium? Do we use the conversion system called, in a Stirling cycle or do we use Brayton cycle? Do we use heat pipes or do not use heat pipes? 

So these are all sort of in the weeds technology decisions.And what we are saying is, let the government stay tech agnostic and let the government lay out safety, performance, cost and timeline envelopes or goals and enforce those milestones and the mission-relevant performance and let industry take a lead on the technology. So you might push back and say, "Hey, this is not how we've done things before." Right? Nuclear is sufficiently hard that we may want to have a government-owned and operated program for option one. But what we are saying is that yes, option one, if we can do it, let's do it. But if we cannot... I think the thing to remember is, we tried that other way and it hasn't worked. 

So maybe let's try something new, where basically the government is setting the outcome, industry is defining the path, and let's see if it works. And again, that's why we chose not the 1.5 megawatt system, but something that could be fielded in a three to five year timeframe. And that's why we have such a big range from 10 to 100 kilowatts. And again, that's also hugely controversial. And what we said is, instead of picking a power level, let's pick the timeline and the budget and let's ask industry to propose the largest system they can within the timeline and the budget. So anyway, so that's option two. It's about a billion dollars of government investment over five years, per agency. 

And we actually have a third option we call, light the path, which is less than one kilowatt electric commercial radioisotope power system. It's not going to power lunar base, it won't be directed energy beams. It won't take us to interstellar space, but it will enable survival during the lunar night. Its purposes is to demonstrate that we can launch safely, we can operate space nuclear payloads. You earn public trust, you establish precedent, you build competence in a lower risk setting, and of course, it provides a fallback if larger efforts slip. So those are kind of our three high risk, medium risk, low risk options. Obviously, the third one is not fission, it's our radioisotope systems. And in the report, we have been agnostic on which option the government goes with, one or two.

Casey Dreier: Well, I like the emphasis that you made in the report was that fielding something is better than fielding nothing at this, right? Just doing anything it seems like, and learning from that and having real data, seems to be what has been elusive since 1965.

Bhavya Lal: Right. I mean, JIMO Prometheus is a really good example from NASA, where we had this beautiful vision of going to the moons of Jupiter, but it was just too big a leap. It was overreach. We did not know how to build a 200 kilowatt system. We should have started smaller. And then of course, as always happens, when push comes to shove, we over budget, behind schedule, something else is more important. In the case of JIMO Prometheus, I think Mike Griffin needed a billion dollars to restart the shuttle program. And so that's, JIMO Prometheus became the bill payer.

Casey Dreier: Well, it's also that kind of ongoing example that you cite in this report that it's a nice to have but not seen as a must. And clearly, I mean, there's an irony too based on kind of shuttle hardware age and maternity at that point, but it's getting this stuff off the ground figurative and literally, requires you also identify here this issue of institutional fragmentation and infrastructure and workforce. We're speaking in the summer of 2025, where none of those things seem to be getting any better. In fact, particularly at NASA and I believe also at DOE, particularly workforce is teetering on disaster. I think NASA has lost a fifth of its workforce in the scope of, a space of a few months. DOE is going to lose thousands as well. Are we even capable at this point, nationally, of standing up a program that would require a centralized focused government authority capable of working effectively with high skilled individuals and building out new infrastructure for something?

Bhavya Lal: That's a very legitimate question, Casey. I think the 4,000 or so people that have left NASA, this is something that people were saying at the start, when you cut, you need to cut with a scalpel, not a machete. And the cuts were made with a machete. So there was no rhyme or reason as to who left. And we don't even know, at least maybe within NASA, there is some assessment underway as to where we have the biggest gaps. But outside of NASA, we don't know what capabilities we have lost versus not because this whole process has been so random. Yeah, I mean, you're right. Execution takes people and a revolution in space, nuclear one come from slogans about making something great again. It'll come from targeted staffing, having the capabilities and obviously also sustain investment and clear priorities. But people matter. People are at the heart of things.

Casey Dreier: Well, and even if they're in private sector, I think the point here is that you still need a very capable public sector to drive this, right? The private sector won't stand this up on its own, and even if they threw money at it, you would still need, it sounds like from reading your report, a very technically savvy and clear minded effective bureaucracy in the government running it. Is that correct?

Bhavya Lal: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, especially if we're talking about a public-private partnership where industries doing a lot of the work. I mean, having strong oversight is important to make sure that we are making progress in the right ways, and if capabilities aren't there in government, we have a problem.

Casey Dreier: I mean, nuclear strikes me as being kind of the essence of why we have a public space program because of this very issue that you've identified has expanded on more in the report that it's complex, uncertain, potentially transformative. As you call it, a disruptive technology that at the same time, has a certain regulatory requirements and mission uncertainty, that you can't just depend on industry to do it just by itself, particularly with the stakes that you've outlined. Why else do we have something like a NASA or a DOE if they can't do these types of potentially transformative activities and bring industry with us?

Bhavya Lal: That's exactly right. So public programs, we talk about the frontier. It is public programs that have de-risked the frontier. Transformative technologies require huge upfront investments, long timelines, and certain payoffs. They lack a clear near term commercial market. Although I think in this case, [inaudible 00:59:09] design it well, we can have a commercial market. Private firms cannot justify that risk. So that's kind of the de-risking piece then, you just mentioned that. Government investment catalyzes ecosystems. I mean, think of DARPA and the internet or even NASA's COTS program and the Commercial Crew Program. When done right, government isn't just building technology, it's building platforms and markets. It can be doing it by providing mission demand, for example. Maybe NASA could be buying power on the Moon, anchoring early procurement, sending clear signals. Governments hold a long view. Public agencies aren't constrained by quarterly earnings or short-term product cycles.

Casey Dreier: But at that same time, we saw DARPA just cancel the DRACO project, which its own` kind of nuclear propulsion demonstration mission that it was doing with NASA. NASA canceled nuclear propulsion in its budget, though it seemed to keep some surface fission power, but it seemed to also, at the same time, at least in this recent budget proposals, to be rejecting that role, at least when it came to nuclear. Is that the right interpretation here? I mean, that's generally focused on propulsion, but if we step away from propulsion, then Congress, as we've seen, is reacting and putting more money back into propulsion and your power focus, the fission power focus seems to be caught up and then lost and drowned in the middle of that because there's also not a lot of institutional focus on it to make up for that.

Bhavya Lal: I think the DRACO cancellation was probably in the works before. For a variety of reasons, it wasn't going in the right direction. I mean, basically, the ultimate design that they were working on was no better than a chemical system. So I think it lost some momentum, but I think this makes my core point, which is, there is no mission pull. So Space Command or Space Force has never stood up and said, DARPA or AFRL or Missile Defense Agency, MDA, "Go develop this thing and give it to us." So the incentive structure is weaker. So as I said, when push comes to shove, DARPA had other priorities. DRACO got the shaft. On the NTP front at NASA, my sense is, this is something I started with, Casey. Let's take something to completion. I think there's drips and drabs. I mean, propulsion is going to be more expensive than power. It's a harder problem to solve. 

Congress had been putting 110-ish million a year, and I don't even think NASA was spending all of it. The way legislations are written, it says things like, up to 110 million or something, and NASA was spending a lot less. So NASA wasn't investing enough in propulsion. And of course, when you don't invest enough, you don't make enough progress and you go in this debt spiral. And I think that's probably what the administration saw and decided to [inaudible 01:02:00]. Again, there's probably other reasons too. For example, maybe at some point, there was a sense that we will go to Mars with chemical propulsion because of Elon's involvement with the administration. I don't know where that is at, but I think the decision is much more, in my mind, it isn't enough money to make progress and maybe the administration says, just kill it. 

Having said that, they did say they wanted to invest in power. And again, I wish that the power levels were higher. It's 20 million. But I think if you do want to deploy something by the end of this decade, it needs to be in the 100-ish million range. I mean, our budget for a 2030 demo is a billion over five years. So we are looking at 200 million. And again, one thing I didn't get a chance to mention is of that one billion, less than half is actually for the demo itself. The remaining half is for the pillars, tech maturation, infrastructure build, and policy and regulatory reform. Those are very important things for the government to be funding. But short answer to your question, Casey, is the decision doesn't seem to have been made either on the side of the administration or on the side of Congress with any kind of end point in mind.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. Last topic very quickly. You brought up Elon Musk, which I think we should talk about Starship. And it's interesting to me that SpaceX and its framing of going to Mars, and I believe, Musk has explicitly said, not worth focusing on nuclear propulsion because it'll just get in the way of getting there. Starship is kind of designed with this, obviously it's huge, and it's in a sense, a brute force attempt to just use chemical propulsion to get you to Mars. And I'd be curious from your perspective on that approach, but also this idea of providing, in a sense, and I've heard this reflected to me from a number of people, I'd say affiliated and within the administration of launch abundance or mass abundance. 

So you have something like Starship come online and suddenly, you're no longer constrained by volume. You're no longer constrained... You could launch so much, you're no longer constrained by how much mass you can put up there. And it made me think of this kind of other idea of a low end disruptive technology, where the examples of this in the past, I thought about, when MP3s became very popular. Technically, they did not sound as good as CDs and they did not sound as good as the future of DVD audio and all these super audio CD technologies that were being put forth in the late 90s. But MP3 won anyway because it was convenient, it was really easy and portable, and consumers ultimately didn't care if there was a better technology out there. They cared that there was something cheap and available. 

The growth of China's power generation over the last couple of decades, some nuclear, some solar, but primarily coal. It's just, you know how to build coal plants. It's a lot less complex to build a coal plant than a nuclear plant. So I see this, do you see a threat, even though with all the idealized kind of benefits provided by nuclear and the ultimate kind of long-term potential benefits, is that this upfront challenge and the cost and complexity, could be undermined by ready availability of just deploying those acres of solar panels or better batteries, kind of the way that it's almost doing so here or even in the United States of solar outpacing the deployment of nuclear as a power source for the future.

Bhavya Lal: It's such a sharp and important line of questioning, Casey, and I think you have the right instinct, low end disruption. I mean, tube sets [inaudible 01:05:54] exquisite billion-dollar spacecraft. You mentioned Starship. I mean, SpaceX has absolutely disrupted national launch, not just by being better, but in fact, not by being better, but by being cheaper and good enough. So it is a totally reasonable question to ask if nuclear, which is expensive, exotic, and slow, is headed for the same fate. But I think this is the rub. Some things just aren't brute forcible. So to your point, launch abundance solves a lot, but you cannot launch sunlight into the lunar night. I mean, there are some problems you just cannot solve with non-nuclear options. You cannot brute force power through a 14-day darkness cycle with batteries, unless you literally bring shipping containers worth of them. Same with Mars dust storms. 

Same with trying to transmit hybrid communications across the outer solar system. Some physical constraints are too hard to scale around with solar, even if launch is free. So this is the distinction I was making earlier about enhancing and enabling missions. I think nuclear should only be, at least initially, nuclear should really focus on areas which are enabling, things that solar cannot do, power ISRU, high power manufacturing, all the places where you need sustained high output, compact power. And again, that's not even a cost issue. It's a physics issue. Nuclear brings a different class of capability and you should only use nuclear when you need that capability. So anytime you can do with solar or batteries, absolutely. Anytime you can fly with chemical propulsion, absolutely. But anytime you need to do deep space science, Mars outposts, interstellar probes, Artemis surface operations, you have no option other than space nuclear.

Casey Dreier: Bhavya Lal, thank you so much for coming on to talk about your new paper or report, I should say, Weighing the Future: Strategic Options for US Space Nuclear Leadership, that you wrote with Roger Myers. I recommend that everyone read it. It's very, I'd say, very readable. And again, I compliment the two of you for that. And it says something and it lays out real demarcations of ideas, and that's available online. And then we will link to it on the show. So Dr. Lal, thank you so much for being here this month.

Bhavya Lal: It was such a pleasure, Casey. I love talking to you. Just talking to you makes my brain bigger. Thank you.

Casey Dreier: Always a delight to have you on. We've reached the end of this month's episode of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. But we will be back next month with more discussions on the politics and philosophies and ideas that power space science and exploration. Help others, in the meantime. Learn more about space policy and the Planetary Society by leaving a review and rating this show on platforms like Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to this show. Your input and interactions really help us be discovered by other curious minds, and that will help them find their place in space through Planetary Radio. 

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