City Labs plans second nuclear satellite demo to test lunar-night heat unit
City Labs
City Labs, fresh off its first nuclear-powered satellite demo, plans a second flight testing a tritium heat source for lunar night survival.
what happened
City Labs plans a second, higher-power nuclear demonstration flight as early as next year, CEO Peter Cabauy told Payload, following the July flight of BOHR, the company's first nuclear-powered payload demo, on SpaceX's Transporter-17 rideshare. BOHR demonstrated City Labs' tritium-powered betavoltaic battery, which generates power independent of sunlight; the second demo will test the company's tritium-powered radioisotope heating unit (RHU), designed to provide payloads with heat rather than electrical power. Cabauy said the RHU is intended to help lunar payloads keep operating through the roughly two-week lunar night.
why it matters
Nuclear heat and power sources that survive the lunar night address one of the main reasons lunar-surface missions die early once the sun sets; if City Labs can commercialize both a battery and a heat source at gram scale, lunar lander and rover builders get an off-the-shelf option instead of designing bespoke radioisotope hardware.
signal-to-noise
quick facts
- Companies
- City Labs
- Category
- product
- Impact
- noise
- SNR
- 2 / 5
- Event date
- 2026-08-26
- Published
- 2026-08-26 17:30 UTC