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Why on Earth would NASA build a nuclear reactor on the Moon?

15 August 2025 at 15:37

"Duffy to announce nuclear reactor on the moon" is not a headline I imagined reading before last week. Sure, as a sci-fi loving nerd, I could see a future where nuclear power played a role in permanent Moon settlements. But the idea of NASA building a 100-kilowatt microreactor there in the next five years seemed ridiculous. Not so, according to scientists.

"I have no idea why this is getting so much play," Professor Bhavya Lal tells me over the phone, with a hint of exasperation in her voice. Lal's response makes sense once you understand the arc of her career; she has spent much of her professional life thinking about how the US should use nuclear power to explore space. At NASA, she served as the acting chief technologist, and was awarded the agency's Distinguished Service Medal. Among her other qualifications, she also testified before Congress on the subject of nuclear propulsion, and even helped rewrite the rules governing launches involving radioactive materials.

Most recently, she wrote a paper titled Weighing the Future: Strategic Options for US Space Nuclear Leadership where she and her co-author, Dr. Roger Myers, examine the past failures of US policy as it relates to nuclear power in space and argue the country should test a small nuclear system on the Moon by 2030. The way Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society — a nonprofit that advocates for the exploration and study of space — tells it, many aspects of Secretary Duffy's plan are "pretty much straight out" of that report.

Lal is more modest and describes the directive Duffy issued as "accelerating ongoing work" at NASA. According to her, the agency has been "funding [space] fission power for years," adding that the only new thing here is that there's a date. "We've done this for more than 60 years," she tells me, and if NASA ends up delivering on Duffy's plan, it wouldn't even be the first nuclear reactor the US has sent into space. That distinction goes to SNAP-10A in 1965.

The reason the US has spent decades exploring space-capable nuclear reactors is simple. "You can get massive amounts of power from very little mass," explains Nick Touran, reactor physicist, nuclear advocate and the founder of What is Nuclear. And for launches to space, keeping payload amounts low is critical.

Just how much power are we talking about? "When fully fissioned, a softball-sized chunk of Uranium-235 offers as much energy as a freight train full of coal," says Dr. Lal. Combined with the limitations of solar power, particularly the farther a spacecraft travels away from the sun, nuclear is a game changer.

An artist concept of a fission power system on the lunar surface
NASA

Dr. Lal points to the New Horizons probe as an example. In 2015, the spacecraft flew past Pluto, in the process capturing stunning photos of the dwarf planet. If you followed the mission closely, you may remember New Horizons didn't make a stop at Pluto. The reason for that is it didn't have enough power to enter orbit. "We had about 200 watts on New Horizons. That's basically two light bulbs worth of power," said Dr. Lal. It subsequently took New Horizons 16 months to send all of the 50-plus gigabytes of data it captured back to Earth. Had the probe had a 20-kilowatt microreactor, Dr. Lal says it could have streamed that data in real-time, on top of entering orbit and operating all of its instruments continuously.

When it comes to the Moon, nuclear would be transformational. On our only natural satellite, nights last 14 Earth days, and there are craters that never see any sunlight. Solar energy could power a permanent NASA outpost on the Moon, but not without a "huge" number of batteries to bridge the two-week gap in power generation, and those batteries would need to be ferried from Earth.

"At some point, we will want to do industrial-scale work on the Moon. Even if we want to do 3D printing, it requires hundreds of kilowatts of power – if not more," said Dr. Lal. "If you're going to do any kind of commercial activity on the Moon, we need more than solar can provide."

On Mars, meanwhile, nuclear power would be absolutely essential. The Red Planet is home to dust storms that can last weeks or months, and cover entire continents. In those conditions, solar power is unreliable. In fact, when NASA finally ended Opportunity's nearly 15-year mission on Mars, it was a planet-wide dust storm that left the rover inoperable.

As such, if the US wants to establish a permanent presence on Mars, Dr. Lal argues it would make the most sense to perfect the necessary reactor technology on the Moon. "We don't want our first-ever nuclear reactor operating on Mars. We want to try it out on the Moon first. And that is what I think NASA is trying to do."

Of course, there are many technical hurdles NASA will need to overcome before any of this is anywhere close to reality. Surprisingly, the most straightforward problem might be finding a 100-kilowatt microreactor. Right now, there's no company in the US producing microreactors. Atomics International and North American Aviation, the companies that built SNAP-10A, went defunct decades ago.

NASA and NNSA engineers lower the wall of the vacuum chamber around KRUSTY system.
Los Alamos National Laboratory

"There are many that are in development, but almost none that are even in the prototype stage," said Touran. As he explains, that's an important detail; most nuclear reactors don't work at all when they're first turned on. "It takes a few iterations to get a reactor up to a level where it's operable, reliable and cost effective," he said.

The good news is Touran believes there's more than enough time for either NASA or a private company to build a working reactor for the project. "I think we're in a great spot to take a good swing at this by 2030," said Touran. In 2018, NASA and the Department of Energy demoed KRUSTY, a lightweight, 10-kilowatt fission system. "That was one of the only newish reactors we've turned on in many decades, and it was done on a shoestring budget," he said.

In the end, deploying a reactor on the Moon may prove more difficult than building one. Based on some rough math done by Dr. Myers, a 100-kilowatt reactor would weigh between 10 to 15 metric tons, meaning no current commercial rocket could carry it to space. NASA will also need to find a way to fit the reactor's radiator inside a rocket. Unfolded, the component will be about the size of a basketball court.

According to Dr. Lal, the 2030 timeline for the project is likely based on the assumption Starship will be ready to fly by then. But Elon Musk's super heavy-lift rocket has had a bad 2025. Of the three test flights SpaceX has attempted this year, two ended in the spacecraft exploding. One of those saw Starship go up in flames during what should have been a routine ground test.

SpaceX's Starship as seen during its eighth test flight
Reuters

If Starship isn't ready by 2030, NASA could conceivably fly the reactor separately from all the other components needed to make a functioning power system, but according to Lal, "that comes with its own set of challenges." Primarily, the agency doesn't have a great way of assembling such a complex system autonomously. In any case, Starship is at least a tangible work in progress. The same can't be said for the lander that would be needed to bring the reactor to the surface of the Moon. In 2021, NASA contracted SpaceX to build a lander for the Artemis missions, but the latest update the two shared on the spacecraft was a pair of 3D renderings. Similarly, Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander has yet to fly, despite promises it could make its first trip to the Moon as early as this spring or summer.   

Another question mark hangs over the entire project. As of the end of July, NASA is on track to lose approximately 4,000 employees who have agreed to leave the agency through either early retirement, a voluntary separation or a deferred resignation — all as part of the Trump administration's broader efforts to trim the number of workers across the entire federal government. All told, NASA is on track to lose about a fifth of its workforce, and morale at the agency is at an all-time low. Even with the Department of Energy and private industry providing support, there's good reason to believe the reductions will affect NASA's ability to deliver the project on time.

"The contradiction inherent in this proposal is that the White House is directing NASA to do the two most ambitious and difficult projects any space program can do, which is to send humans to the Moon and Mars, but to do so with a resource level and workforce equivalent to what the agency had before the first humans went to space in 1961," said Dreier.

A NASA spokesperson declined to share specifics on the reductions — including the number of employees set to leave the Glenn Research Center, the facility that built the KRUSTY reactor, and where much of the agency's nuclear engineering talent is concentrated. "As more official information becomes available, we anticipate answering more of your questions," the spokesperson said.

"I wish there was some inventory of the 4,000 people who left. What gaps are left? We have no idea if the departures were systematic," said Dr. Lal. "NASA has not been open or transparent about what types of employees have taken the deferred resignation program, where those skills are and where they're departing from," Drier added. "Nuclear engineering is not a common field for most people. [The reductions] certainly can't help." Still, both Lal and Touran believe the involvement of the Department of Energy is likely to swing things in NASA's favor.

In a statement NASA shared with Engadget, Secretary Duffy downplayed the workforce concerns. “NASA remains committed to our mission, even as we work within a more prioritized budget and changes with our workforce. NASA retains a strong bench of talent. I am confident that our exceptional team remains capable of executing upon my directives safely and in a timely manner and will continue to carry our work forward," he said. "We will continue to ensure America continues to lead in space exploration, advancing progress on key goals including returning Americans to the Moon and planting the Stars and Stripes on Mars, as we usher in the Golden Age of American innovation.”

In their report, Lal and Myers estimate it would cost about $800 million annually for five years to build and deploy a nuclear reactor on the Moon. Even if DoE support can prevent NASA's staffing cuts from kneecapping the project, its feasibility will hinge on if the Trump administration ponies up the cash to execute on its own bold claims.

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/why-on-earth-would-nasa-build-a-nuclear-reactor-on-the-moon-153741891.html?src=rss

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Residents watch as a full moon known as the "Sturgeon Moon" rises over a horizon in Kyiv, Ukraine August 9. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko

New adhesive surface modeled on a remora works underwater

9 August 2025 at 11:08

Most adhesives can’t stick to wet surfaces because water and other fluids disrupt the adhesive’s bonding mechanisms. This problem, though, has been beautifully solved by evolution in remora suckerfish, which use an adhesive disk on top of their heads to attach to animals like dolphins, sharks, and even manta rays.

A team of MIT scientists has now taken a close look at these remora disks and reverse-engineered them. “Basically, we looked at nature for inspiration,” says Giovanni Traverso, a professor at MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering and senior author of the study.

Sticking Variety

Remora adhesive disks are an evolutionary adaptation of the fish’s first dorsal fin, the one that in other species sits on top of the body, just behind the head and gill covers. The disk rests on an intercalary backbone—a bone structure that most likely evolved from parts of the spine. This bony structure supports lamellae, specialized bony plates with tiny backward-facing spikes called spinules. The entire disk is covered with soft tissue compartments that are open at the top. “This makes the remora fish adhere very securely to soft-bodied, fast-moving marine hosts,” Traverso says.

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Google discovered a new scam—and also fell victim to it

7 August 2025 at 20:05

In June, Google said it unearthed a campaign that was mass-compromising accounts belonging to customers of Salesforce. The means: an attacker pretending to be someone in the customer's IT department feigning some sort of problem that required immediate access to the account. Two months later, Google has disclosed that it, too, was a victim.

The series of hacks are being carried out by financially motivated threat actors out to steal data in hopes of selling it back to the targets at sky-high prices. Rather than exploiting software or website vulnerabilities, they take a much simpler approach: calling the target and asking for access. The technique has proven remarkably successful. Companies whose Salesforce instances have been breached in the campaign, Bleeping Computer reported, include Adidas, Qantas, Allianz Life, Cisco, and the LVMH subsidiaries Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany & Co.

Better late than never

The attackers abuse a Salesforce feature that allows customers to link their accounts to third-party apps that integrate data with in-house systems for blogging, mapping tools, and similar resources. The attackers in the campaign contact employees and instruct them to connect an external app to their Salesforce instance. As the employee complies, the attackers ask the employee for an eight-digit security code that the Salesforce interface requires before a connection is made. The attackers then use this number to gain access to the instance and all data stored in it.

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19 college majors where the typical graduate is making at least $100,000 by the middle of their careers

10 July 2025 at 14:43
Students at Harvard University's commencement, wearing graduation caps and gowns
Mid-career college graduates with one of 19 majors typically earn at least $100,000 a year, per a New York Fed analysis.

Josh Reynolds/For The Washington Post via Getty Images

  • The New York Fed analyzed the mid-career wages of college graduates with a bachelor's degree.
  • Graduates aged 35 to 45 in 19 areas of study had a median wage of at least $100,000 a year. 
  • Ten of those 19 college majors were related to engineering.

When undergraduate college students choose their majors, there can be several factors that go into their decisions.

But if maximizing one's future earnings is high on their priority list, some areas of study have a better track record than others.

A New York Fed analysis of 2023 American Community Survey data found that college graduates who majored in one of 19 areas of study had a median mid-career wage of at least $100,000 a year. The New York Fed defined mid-career as people between the ages of 35 and 45. The analysis of 73 majors and groups of study only included people with a bachelor's degree — no additional graduate school education — and used what's noted as people's first major.

One general area of study accounted for 10 of the 19 spots: engineering.

Aerospace engineering majors had the top median mid-career wage of $125,000, per the analysis. Three other engineering fields followed behind — computer, chemical, and electrical.

Jaison Abel, the head of microeconomics at the New York Fed, told Business Insider that engineering is a great example of the type of college major that has the quantitative skills businesses tend to want.

"There is a bit of a premium on the demand side, and also these are relatively challenging majors to get through," Abel said. "When you've got quite a bit of demand for the skills and not as much supply of the types of people who are coming in, that's going to make wages overall go up and be high."

Computer science, economics, and finance were the three non-engineering majors with the highest mid-career median wages. Across all the majors analyzed, the median mid-career wage was $83,000 a year.

While the prospect of high mid-career earnings is likely attractive to many students, this appeal hinges on actually landing a job in their field of study — a feat that has become increasingly difficult for some college graduates.

A New York Fed analysis of unemployment data showed 5.8% of recent college graduates in the labor force between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed in March, up from 3.9% in October 2022. Absent the pandemic-related spike and its recovery over the next year, that's the highest rate since 2013.

Student loans and the cost of college may affect how a degree is valued

As college tuition rates have risen in recent decades, many Americans have taken on a considerable amount of student debt. In 2024 dollars, the average price for tuition and fees at private nonprofit, four-year schools has increased 30% from the 2004-05 academic year to $43,350 for the 2024-25 academic year. Public, four-year in-state schools are much cheaper, but their average cost has also climbed during that timeframe. Housing and food expenses make the cost of school even higher.

The average American consumer with student loans had a debt balance of about $35,000 as of the third quarter of last year, per Experian data. That's a decline from the average in the third quarter of 2023.

This changing landscape has caused some people to question whether college is a worthwhile investment. In response to these concerns, some high school graduates have gone straight to the workforce, while others have opted for alternative paths, like community college or trade schools.

Not all job openings require someone to have a particular level of education. However, sometimes a college degree is preferred for a job seeker. Automaker Stellantis said in a previous statement that "most non-bargaining unit positions (salaried) require an associate's or bachelor's degree," but also noted that "for some positions, a degree might be a preferred qualification which would open those up to people who can demonstrate proficiency in other ways."

College graduates who majored in early childhood education had the lowest median mid-career wage, at $49,000 a year. Other types of education majors had relatively low mid-career median wages, such as secondary education.

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After 27 years, engineer discovers how to display secret photo in Power Mac ROM

27 June 2025 at 21:32

On Tuesday, software engineer Doug Brown published his discovery of how to trigger a long-known but previously inaccessible Easter egg in the Power Mac G3's ROM: a hidden photo of the development team that nobody could figure out how to display for 27 years. While Pierre Dandumont first documented the JPEG image itself in 2014, the method to view it on the computer remained a mystery until Brown's reverse engineering work revealed that users must format a RAM disk with the text "secret ROM image."

Brown stumbled upon the image while using a hex editor tool called Hex Fiend with Eric Harmon's Mac ROM template to explore the resources stored in the beige Power Mac G3's ROM. The ROM appeared in desktop, minitower, and all-in-one G3 models from 1997 through 1999.

"While I was browsing through the ROM, two things caught my eye," Brown wrote. He found both the HPOE resource containing the JPEG image of team members and a suspicious set of Pascal strings in the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code that included ".Edisk," "secret ROM image," and "The Team."

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Engineer creates first custom motherboard for 1990s PlayStation console

12 June 2025 at 18:51

Last week, electronics engineer Lorentio Brodesco announced the completion of a mock-up for nsOne, reportedly the first custom PlayStation 1 motherboard created outside of Sony in the console's 30-year history. The fully functional board accepts original PlayStation 1 chips and fits directly into the original console case, marking a milestone in reverse-engineering for the classic console released in 1994.

Brodesco's motherboard isn't an emulator or FPGA-based re-creation—it's a genuine circuit board designed to work with authentic PlayStation 1 components, including the CPU, GPU, SPU, RAM, oscillators, and voltage regulators. The board represents over a year of reverse-engineering work that began in March 2024 when Brodesco discovered incomplete documentation while repairing a PlayStation 1.

"This isn't an emulator. It's not an FPGA. It's not a modern replica," Brodesco wrote in a Reddit post about the project. "It's a real motherboard, compatible with the original PS1 chips."

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“The girl should be calling men.” Leak exposes Black Basta’s influence tactics.

8 April 2025 at 20:47

A leak of 190,000 chat messages traded among members of the Black Basta ransomware group shows that it’s a highly structured and mostly efficient organization staffed by personnel with expertise in various specialties, including exploit development, infrastructure optimization, social engineering, and more.

The trove of records was first posted to file-sharing site MEGA. The messages, which were sent from September 2023 to September 2024, were later posted to Telegram in February 2025. ExploitWhispers, the online persona who took credit for the leak, also provided commentary and context for understanding the communications. The identity of the person or persons behind ExploitWhispers remains unknown. Last month’s leak coincided with the unexplained outage of the Black Basta site on the dark web, which has remained down ever since.

“We need to exploit as soon as possible”

Researchers from security firm Trustwave’s SpiderLabs pored through the messages, which were written in Russian, and published a brief blog summary and a more detailed review of the messages on Tuesday.

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