The company Honeybee Robotics has outlined a plan to build a kind of electrical network on the Moon, with a network of towers the size of the Statue of Liberty that contain solar panels and batteries that provide power and communications, and even act as streetlights.
More than 50 years have passed since humans last set foot on the Moon, but NASA’s Artemis mission plans to send them back soon. And this time, to stay: the program aims to establish a permanent presence on the lunar surface and in lunar orbit, laying the groundwork for eventually traveling to Mars.
Building a human colony on the Moon will of course require some infrastructure. Companies like Nokia are helping to establish 4G networks for communications, and Northrop Grumman is developing a lunar railway concept for the transportation of astronauts, materials, and equipment.
What are these lunar streetlights that harness solar energy?
This is part of the Lunar Architecture Capabilities Study at 10 Years (LunA-10), and Honeybee Robotics has been selected as part of that same initiative to develop a new infrastructure technology called LUNARSABER.
Of course, it is an acronym that apparently stands for “Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution.”
Each LUNARSABER would be a deployable package that would turn into a 100-meter tall tower, according to another acronym: DIABLO—Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations.
Each tower contains a mix of solar panels, batteries, wireless power transmission and communication equipment, and even lights. They could generate energy from the two consecutive weeks of sunlight that the lunar surface experiences, store it locally, and save it for the following two weeks of darkness.
Honeybee has built two types of solar panels. One is an “origami bellows” that wraps around the mast, providing 360-degree coverage to capture sunlight from any angle. The other deploys large sails and tracks the location of the Sun in the sky to keep them at the optimal angle. Deployed near the South Pole of the Moon, the team claims it allows access to nearly 95% of sunlight throughout the year.
Specialized and dust-resistant plugs located at the bottom could power the equipment locally. Alternatively, the construction of a network of these poles in line of sight with each other could allow them to transmit their energy and wireless communication signals over long distances, effectively establishing a lunar network that connects different outposts and even vehicles.
Useful uses of solar power stations
Let’s suppose, for example, that a vehicle runs out of energy in the middle of a lunar night and there are 8 days until sunrise. A nearby LUNARSABER could aim a beam of concentrated sunlight at its solar panels to make it work again.
The lights fixed to gimbals on the outside could even act as streetlights, breaking the darkness of the fifteen-day night and keeping the first human settlers safe from alien attacks.
It’s a fun science fiction concept, but of course, there are many things that need to go right before LUNARSABERs are distributed throughout the Moon. The original plan of NASA was for humans to return this year, but now it has been delayed until late 2026. The implementation of such a large infrastructure would happen much later, if it ever happens.
