If you’re on the Moon and your phone is about to die, there aren’t many places to plug in the charger. But Honeybee Robotics has outlined a plan to build a kind of power grid up there, with a network of Statue of Liberty-sized towers containing solar panels and batteries that provide power and communications, and even act as streetlights.
Humans haven’t set foot on the Moon in more than 50 years, but NASA’s Artemis mission plans to send them back soon. And this time, we’re there to stay – the program aims to set up a permanent presence on the lunar surface and orbit, laying the foundations to eventually journey to Mars.
Building a human colony on the Moon will of course require some infrastructure. Companies like Nokia are helping set up 4G networks for communication, and Northrop Grumman is developing a lunar railway concept for transporting astronauts, materials and equipment.
The latter is part of the 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) Capability Study, and Honeybee Robotics has been selected as part of that same initiative to develop a new infrastructure technology it calls LUNARSABER. Of course, this is a classically clumsy acronym, apparently standing for “Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution.” You’re allowed to give stuff cool names like LUNARSABER if you want, guys! You don’t have to pretend it stands for anything.
Each LUNARSABER would be a deployable package that unfolds into a 100-m (328-ft) tall tower, by way of another terrible acronym – Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations, or DIABLO.
Each tower contains a mix of solar panels, batteries, wireless power and communications transmission equipment, and even lights. They’d be able to generate power from the two straight weeks of sunlight the lunar surface experiences, store it locally and save it for the two weeks of darkness that follows.
Honeybee has built two types of solar panels. One is an “origami bellows” that wraps around the pole, providing 360-degree coverage to capture sunlight from any angle. The other unfurls big sails and tracks the location of the Sun in the sky to keep them at the optimal angle. Deployed near the Moon’s south pole, the team says this provides access to nearly 95% of the solar light throughout the year.
Specialized, dust-resistant plugs at the bottom could power up equipment locally. Or building a network of these poles within line of sight of each other could let them beam their energy and wireless comms signals over long distances, effectively setting up a lunar grid that connects different outposts and even vehicles.
For example, say your lunar rover runs out of juice in the middle of the lunar night, with 8 days to go till dawn. A nearby LUNARSABER could just aim a beam of concentrated sunlight at its solar panels to get it moving again.
Lights attached to gimbals on the outside can even act like streetlights, breaking up the darkness of the fortnight night and keeping the first human settlers safe from getting mugged by aliens.
It’s a fun sci-fi concept, but of course there’s a lot that needs to go right before LUNARSABERs are dotted all over the Moon. NASA’s original plan was to have humans back up there this year, but it’s now been delayed until late 2026. A rollout of big infrastructure like this would be much later than that, if ever.
The Honeybee team discusses the concept in the video below.
Source: Honeybee Robotics
