Three teams comprised of 35 students from eight different MIT departments and Wellesley College have been working since fall 2025 to design critical early infrastructure for a moon base. This June, their designs were recognized with five awards at NASA's 2026 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts — Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Forum. Among 75 submissions and 14 finalists, the MIT teams secured first and second place in the competition, along with three best-in-theme awards. The Exploration-Class Lunar Integrated Power SystEm (ECLIPSE) team won first place overall and first in its theme category, lunar surface power. The communications and navigation constellation team, MELIORA, won second place overall and first in its theme category on Mars communications, position navigation, and timing, including a strategy to validate the design on the moon. CHEESEBURGER, a campaign to mine and process lunar regolith into oxygen, metals, and bricks, won first in its theme category, lunar technology demonstrations.
"NASA spent the spring telling the world what critical early infrastructure their upcoming permanent moon base will need," says George Lordos, a research scientist and lecturer in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and System Design and Management (SDM), who co-advised all three teams. "Over 30 MIT students spent this academic year designing much of the moon base — systems for generating, storing, and distributing power; robust systems for positioning, navigating, and communicating; and early experiments with essential technologies to live sustainably off the moon’s own dirt."
A Power Grid for Surviving Lunar Night
The hardest constraint on NASA’s moon base is staying powered, as a failure in life-support power would doom the crew within hours. ECLIPSE is a reference design for a lunar grid engineered to stay operational for over 99.995% of the time — fewer than 27 minutes of downtime a year in the worst-case scenario, the standard demanded of the most critical data centers on Earth. It pairs two power sources that fail in different ways: banks of 20-meter solar masts in the sunlit highlands near the south pole, and for the roughly 18-day stretch each year when the sun drops below the horizon, a pair of buried 20-kilowatt microreactors named CARROT, (Compact Autonomous Regolith-shielded Reactor Operating for Ten years). The CARROT reactor, a novel design developed independently by the ECLIPSE team, ended up being similar in design to NASA’s SR-1 reactor for the 2028 mission to Mars, both aiming to maximize speed-to-deployment.
A Network for Exploring the Moon and Mars
MELIORA acts as the base’s relay and GPS. Although RASC-AL framed the communications, positioning, navigation, and timing competition sub-theme around Mars, the team also proposed a plan to validate their design in lunar geometry first, aligning with the agency’s strategy to prove technology on the moon before extending it to Mars.
To find the best design, the team ran a trade study across 5,764 candidate constellation geometries, resulting in an initial three satellites growing to 23, returning over 100 megabits per second to Earth-orbiting data networks over free-space optical links.
Making Oxygen, Metal, and Bricks from Lunar Dirt
After power and communications, the third essential pillar of a lunar base is living off the land. The moon’s own regolith can supply oxygen to breathe and burn, metal to build with, and shielding to protect against deadly radiation. CHEESEBURGER is a campaign of five robotic payloads that prove the supply chain one link at a time, followed by integration of the five into the first end-to-end lunar industry.
Collaboration and Innovation Among Student Teams
More than 30 students contributed across the teams, from AeroAstro, SDM, Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), EECS, Mechanical Engineering (MechE), and other disciplines. The design of ECLIPSE’s grid is sized to power CHEESEBURGER’s processing, showcasing how these projects are interconnected.
The winning teams demonstrated how academic innovation can support Artemis mission goals. NASA expects astronauts living on the lunar surface for months at a time by the early 2030s — the window for which ECLIPSE, MELIORA, and CHEESEBURGER were designed.
Blogger's Review: The MIT teams showcase the power of scientific innovation in creating viable designs for a lunar base. Their collaborative effort not only addresses technological challenges but also has profound implications for future space exploration, marking a significant step forward that deserves industry attention and emulation.