Blue Origin has unveiled its Power Tower for future Moon bases, which will be carried by the company's Mark 1 lunar lander. After touchdown, the spacecraft will deploy a 20-m (66-ft)-tall solar array for around-the-clock electrical power.
One major stumbling block of all lunar missions has been the Moon's day, which consists of 14 Earth days of daylight and 14 days of darkness. Whatever the purpose of the mission, it had to contend with the fact that solar panels can only provide power during the long day, but not the night when the long darkness and intense cold reduce the odds of a solar-powered lander surviving until dawn to practically nil.
The usual answer to this has been to rely on nuclear power to make it through the night, but there is an alternative that steals a page from Earth's playbook.
Power changes what’s possible on the lunar surface.
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) September 25, 2026
Our Power Tower is a 20-meter-tall, vertically deployed solar array system designed to provide more than 10 kilowatts of power for Moon Base operations at the lunar South Pole. Its modular architecture will support future… pic.twitter.com/I1BwBnxKAv
If you managed to stay awake in geography class, you probably learned that the Earth tilts on its axis, causing the Sun to rise and fall in the sky throughout the year, creating the seasons, and plunging the polar regions into six months of darkness after six months of light.
But what does this have to do with the Moon?
Quite a bit, actually. The Moon also tilts on its axis, though only about 1.54° relative to the ecliptic. This means that the Sun at the lunar South Pole never entirely sets. Instead, it skims along the horizon with night only lasting a few hours in the summer and two to seven days in the winter. When the Sun is shining, it comes in beams that cast long, often permanent shadows in craters and hollows.
The low-angle light plays hobs with conventional solar panels lying flat on a lander, but Blue Origin's Power Tower is designed to exploit the near-eternal sunset/sunrise. When the Mark 1 sets down, it will raise a mast made out of spiraling alloy sections. On top of this mast is a folded-up solar array that cascades down like a pair of window blinds. They catch the oblique sunshine and follow it around as it circles the horizon.
The result is solar power available from 44% to 100% of the time, depending on the season. Meanwhile, having a 10-m (33-ft) tall lander with a mast on top twice the height of a utility pole or 70 times taller than a Pembrokeshire Welsh Corgi means that the array can capture even more power from the extended horizon.
According to the company, each tower in its present form has an output of more than 10 kW, which is pretty formidable by space engineering standards. The purpose of the technology is to aid future missions, including bases to explore, exploit, and guard the deep cold of the shadowed craters and the water ice within them, which would be vital to any permanent human presence on the Moon.
As part of this, the Power Tower is envisioned by Blue Origin as the core of a microgrid of such towers connected together to charge rovers, habitats, and mining or ISRU (In-Situ Resource Utilization) processing units.
Source: Blue Origin
