An international collaborative mission to return humans to the moon is underway, and the Canadian Space Mining Corporation (CSMC) is taking steps to be part of the team.
“This is a technology Canada developed, which no one has tried to commercialize in 40 years.”
Dan Sax
CSMC
At the end of November, Toronto-based space tech startup CSMC signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) and licensing term sheet with Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), part of the federal Crown corporation responsible for nuclear research, to explore commercializing the technology behind the Canadian-made SLOWPOKE-2 nuclear reactor.
The ultimate goal? Provide the power for people working and doing research on the moon.
“We put together a plan for Canada to put a reactor on the moon, well ahead of any international competitors,” CSMC CEO Dan Sax told BetaKit in an interview. “That drew us, very early on, to the SLOWPOKE, which was right in line with the power scales needed by NASA and the international community.”
The SLOWPOKE-2 is a nuclear reactor historically used for research, and only three of the eight ever made are still in commission: one at the Royal Military College of Canada, one at École Polytechnique in Montréal, and one at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. According to Sax, the reactor generates heat and is used to teach students how to use nuclear reactors for research.
However, with some modifications to help scale up its power and convert that energy into electricity, Sax told BetaKit that this reactor could power future lunar operations.
“We’ve managed to cut off a significant amount of time and cost to the development of a [nuclear] reactor,” Sax said.
Sax said he was inspired to create CSMC as conversation around Artemis, NASA’s international collaboration to return astronauts to the moon, heated up. Natural Resources Canada also highlighted the importance of space mining in its 2020 Minerals and Mining report. As he looked into it, he realized “No one was actually doing anything about it.”
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Sax, who comes from a real estate financing background, described the founding of CSMC in 2021 as the product of an existential crisis during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I reflected back on the 15 years that I’d spent in real estate, and I wasn’t really sure what it achieved,” Sax said. “ I worked on $4.5 billion in deals, and investors made money, and there was some small scale impact, but I realized that I wanted to have impact at planetary scale.”
Sax said it dawned on him early on that energy would be the “gating factor” limiting the presence of humans on the moon, due to the harsh lunar environment. The days and nights on Earth’s only moon are two weeks long each, with temperatures fluctuating between 121 C during the day to -133 C at night, according to NASA.
The long nights disqualify solar power, while the wild variance in temperature can break other kinds of infrastructure, according to Sax, so he began exploring nuclear power. That led CSMC to CNL, the owner and manager of the patent for the SLOWPOKE, which Sax describes as “effectively Crown technology.”
“This is a technology Canada developed, which no one has tried to commercialize in 40 years, and we’ve been working on doing so for three [years].”
So, what makes the SLOWPOKE-2 an attractive option for space-faring? Well, Sax describes the size of the microreactor as comparable to an aluminum trash can — and in space, minimizing mass is everything.
“Mass is a massive constraint and a massive cost; everything is like a cost per kilogram,” Sax explained. “We think we are lower mass than all the international competitors, and that’s a major strategic advantage for Canada.”
While the stars aren’t exactly aligning for the Artemis mission, as NASA and the Canadian Space Agency announced a delay earlier this month, the MOU also outlines exploring the use of SLOWPOKE-2 in powering arctic communities.
The bonus use-case for the reactor is meant to support the federal government’s net-zero carbon emissions goals, as well as its mandate to eliminate the use of diesel generators in the arctic by 2030, according to Sax.
Once it can, CSMC is looking to deliver dozens, if not hundreds, of reactors to the Arctic for Indigenous communities to replace diesel generators with. Sax touted the 10-year fuel life of the reactor, meaning less logistical concerns in delivering fuel, and much less environmental damage from diesel emissions.
The Arctic is heating up much faster than the rest of the planet, Sax pointed out: “That will kill us all at some point in time if that trend continues.”
He estimated that a single reactor could start by powering a small remote community of roughly 50 homes and scaling up from there.
While an MOU is only a first step, and full agreement negotiations are currently taking place, Sax said CSMC is currently raising financing and government support. With financial backing from the Canadian Space Agency, CSMC is finalizing its conceptual design for the SLOWPOKE, which is expected to be completed next year. That makes way for the detailed design process, which will then lead to the construction of a demonstration reactor to prove the new-and-modified SLOWPOKE-2 is safe to sell.
As CSMC works down the list of requirements, Sax estimated that his company can be ready to put nuclear power on the moon by 2029, as long as everything else is in place.
“I think we’re just trying to make sure that Canada is ready, that it’s capable, and that its capabilities outmatch any of the international partners.”
Feature image by Arya Winarto via Unsplash.
The post The Canadian Space Mining Corporation thinks it can put a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2029 first appeared on BetaKit.