“It would make power, communications, lighting very accessible to all payloads that are sitting on the surface.”

Moonbeams

Spacetech company Honeybee Robotics, which was acquired by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin in 2022, has come up with a concept for a 330-foot pole that could act like an oversized streetlight for a future base on the surface of the Moon.

The company’s Lunar Utility Navigation with Advanced Remote Sensing and Autonomous Beaming for Energy Redistribution (LUNARSABER) concept is designed to hold one ton of scientific equipment on top of it, and could also assist with communications, distribute power, and even form a mesh network with other poles like it.

While it’s not much more than a highly ambitious concept at this stage, the company was awarded funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as part of its Ten-year Lunar Architecture Capability Study (LunA-10) last year.

“It would make power, communications, lighting very accessible to all payloads that are sitting on the surface,” Honeybee principal investigator Vishnu Sanigepalli in a new video about the concept.

Power Tower

Honeybee has had to come up with an in-situ manufacturing process to get a 330-foot pole to the Moon since no rocket is large enough to deliver it in one piece. Its Deployable Interlocking Actuated Bands for Linear Operations (DIABLO) is a system that can bend a rolled piece of metal into cylindrical structures.

Once deployed, the LUNARSABER could light up the surrounding area during the night, which stretches two Earth weeks on the lunar surface, with floodlights.

It could also generate power via solar panels when the Sun is up. Thanks to its considerable height, it could capture sunlight for longer hours than if it were on the ground. Honeybee estimates that such a structure could produce around 100 kilowatts of power.

“If we have the ability to build really tall structures near the south poles, we can essentially ensure that there is greater than 95 percent illumination throughout the lunar year,” Sanigepalli told Space.com last year. “This depends on the location and the height.”

The company also suggests the tower could be used to beam power wirelessly to structures in its line of sight. It could also be used to provide a future lunar base with a wireless communication network.

Honeybee isn’t limiting itself to NASA, and is hoping to leverage “both commercial and non-commercial customers” for its LUNARSABER concept, as Sanigepalli explained in a press release last year.

“I would say the best way to describe LUNARSABER would be a Swiss army knife,” said Sanigepalli in the video. “It’s highly adaptable and versatile and you can customize it.”

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