Startup concentrates solar to melt NASA’s lunar landing pads

<div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_29668"><a href="https://www.solarpaces.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Lunar-Articulating-Mirror-Array.png"><img alt="Lunar Articulating Mirror Array" class="size-full wp-image-29668" height="531" src="https://www.solarpaces.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Lunar-Articulating-Mirror-Array.png" width="750" /></a><h3 class="wp-caption-text">Outward Technologies Lunar Articulating Mirror Array</h3></div>
<p><strong>SolarPACES interviews Ryan Garvey, Founder and Principal Research Scientist at <a href="https://outward.tech/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Outward Technologies</a>, which has NASA funding to develop its concentrated solar system for resource extraction, surface construction, and habitat development on the Moon and other planetary bodies, using solar 3D printing of landing pads, roadways, and habitats directly from lunar regolith, without the need for binders or additives.</strong></p>
<p><strong>SK: So how will you deploy concentrated solar on the Moon for NASA?<br />
</strong><strong>RG:</strong> Our company Outward Technologies is developing a lunar articulating mirror array, to make landing pads using the lunar soil or “regolith” as the feedstock. We&#8217;ve shown that we can concentrate light down onto the lunar soil directly to melt it and fuse it into landing pads with just our mirrors. Nothing else needed from Earth.</p>
<p>The ultimate goal is to have large heliostat arrays on the lunar surface and 3D print the regolith to construct landing pads, roadways, habitats. And to ultimately extract resources, principally oxygen and metals from the lunar regolith. Concentrated solar is amazing on the Moon. There’s no wind loads, low gravity, no clouds and the sun moves 28 times slower than on Earth.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve been quite lucky in that we&#8217;ve had a great partner with NASA. We&#8217;ve been funded by three sources so far. NASA, the state of Colorado, and the National Science Foundation, and they&#8217;ve all been tremendous in enabling us to do this.</p>
<p>NASA is primarily targeting the lunar south pole for developing permanent infrastructure. At the lunar poles, you have very low solar elevation angles and high solar availability. So there are these locations where the sun is just always circling around you. With a tall enough structure &#8211; because you get shadows during that lunar day behind craters &#8211; you can access sunlight continuously. There’s a small area at the poles &#8211; about 40 acres &#8211; with solar availability over 90% up to 100% if you extend high enough.</p>
<p>The Moon is the same distance from the Sun as Earth, so the direct normal irradiance is similar to that above Earth’s atmosphere &#8211; about 1,350 W/m2. But because the sunlight is uninterrupted for long periods at certain locations, the annual solar irradiation at these sites can exceed 10 MWh/m2/year &#8211; roughly three times higher than the best locations on Earth such as the cloudless Atacama Desert.</p>
<p><strong>SK: What temperature do you need to melt regolith?<br />
</strong><strong>RG:</strong> The darker basalt composition needs over 1050°C to melt it. The lighter anorthosite regolith is more reflective, and has a higher melting temperature. Anywhere above 1150°C will sinter and melt that. We target about 1300°C so that you get a really good, more homogeneous melt of both types.</p>
<p><strong>SK: And you just reflect concentrated solar flux directly onto the regolith to melt it? There’s <a href="https://www.solarpaces.org/worldwide-csp/how-concentrated-solar-power-works/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">no solar receiver</a>?<br />
</strong><strong>RG:</strong> Exactly. We can target any spot up to seven meters away from the lander and retain the concentration ratios that we need to sinter the regolith. We don&#8217;t have to move the concentrator &#8211; we can steer this spot over a very large working area.</p>
<p><strong>SK: Won&#8217;t habitats need over seven meters?<br />
</strong><strong>RG:</strong> Yes, if we&#8217;re going to construct these large structures, we need to be able to concentrate the spot across a larger operating range. You can only do so much with just a lander-mounted solar concentrator. To cover 20 or 30 meters from the lander you need a rover to drive out to position a secondary solar concentrator to sinter and melt out to those distances.</p>
<p>So we have developed secondary solar concentrators that you can beam light into to increase the concentration ratio. That&#8217;s a traditional compound parabolic concentrator of a reflective type construction, and we actively cool it so that we can run it perpetually without stopping. And using that secondary solar concentrator, we have shown the ability to reach temperatures well in excess of 1700°C from these small concentrators. So with the secondary solar concentrator, we can extend the working range to over 20 meters from the lander. The ultimate goal is to have both, the lander mounted LAMA and this mobile one, SEER we’d leave on the Moon.</p>
<div class="wp-caption alignnone" id="attachment_29672"><a href="https://www.solarpaces.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Lunar-Articulating-Mirror-Array-Working-Range.png"><img alt="Lunar Articulating Mirror Array Working Range" class="size-full wp-image-29672" height="632" src="https://www.solarpaces.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Lunar-Articulating-Mirror-Array-Working-Range.png" width="750" /></a><h3 class="wp-caption-text">Lunar Articulating Mirror Array (LAMA) Working Range, and with the mobile Sintering End Effector for Regolith (SEER)</h3></div>
<p><strong>SK: So your heliostat array is lots of little square mirrors moving independently?<br />
</strong><strong>RG:</strong> We have a whole bunch of mirror elements that are independently tip-tilt actuated. And so what we&#8217;ve shown is that we can focus and concentrate the light down onto a spot up to about seven meters away from this lunar lander array and still reach temperatures of 1300°C or higher.</p>
<p>We have to be able to shine that spot onto the surface and then change the position of the spot, since we&#8217;re having to melt a huge area of the ground.<br />
So each mirror is actuated so we can concentrate the spot onto the ground surface, and then move where that concentrated spot is, within a workable range.</p>
<p><strong>SK: How to move the mirrors to adjust the aiming point?</strong><br />
<strong>RG:</strong> Very small motors. The lander already includes photovoltaic arrays powering its communication, etc. and which will be used to power the motors of the concentrating array. The concentrator would be mounted at the very top of the lunar lander in a stowed configuration. It’s currently pretty small, a little over two square meters, so we can fit it onto a lunar lander. Once you land and the dust settles, you deploy the structure. It’s mounted onto a telescoping mast that then rises above the lander to maximize access to sunlight.</p>
<p>Because each mirror is small and they’re low mass themselves, and there&#8217;s no wind, and the sun moves so slowly, it doesn&#8217;t take much power to move them. On Earth, our prototype array is around 200 kilograms. In lunar gravity with no wind we can reduce it down quite a bit, but certainly under 75 kilograms. We have reached very, very high temperatures with very small concentrators. With just that single array we&#8217;re reaching temperatures in excess of 1300°C.</p>
<p><strong>SK: How thick do just lunar landing pads need to be?<br />
</strong><strong>RG:</strong> We&#8217;ve looked into this quite extensively. To resist the thermal shock from the high temperatures of the lander plume, you can achieve that with a very thin structure. Basically anything over five millimeters, surprisingly thin, is capable of resisting those high heat fluxes.</p>
<p><strong>SK: And thicker layers would be 3D printed?<br />
</strong><strong>RG:</strong> Yes, we’ve demonstrated that we can fuse the regolith in these multi-layer structures to get any depth or thickness that you might need. With a single layer, we have a structure that is thicker than 10 millimeters, melted down into the subsurface. We have related technology to add a layer of regolith on top of each previous layer, and then melt the second, third and so forth, subsequent layers, and fuse them into those underlying layers. This allows the near limitless production of structures on the Moon’s surface.</p>
<p><strong>SK: Does such low gravity make it difficult to deposit 3D-printed layers?<br />
</strong><strong>RG:</strong> Yes, the flowability of regolith is highly gravitationally dependent, so we had to demonstrate directly, that under lunar gravity conditions, the device still worked for depositing the regolith layers to be able to melt them together. We proved the deposition process works quite well in simulated lunar gravity, using reduced gravity parabolic flights.</p>
<p>I got to fly with our team on a Boeing 727 doing these parabolic flights to simulate lunar gravity. As you plummet to the ground, your gravitational force becomes one-sixth that of Earth&#8217;s gravity. It&#8217;s quite a ride! And the device showed that, yes, we can deposit the regolith to build those multi-layer structures even in lunar gravity.</p>
<p><strong>SK: Was that test with real lunar regolith samples?<br />
</strong><strong>RG:</strong> No, but with a lunar regolith simulant. The 1960s Apollo missions brought back quite a bit of regolith. NASA characterized the samples to derive terrestrial rock types with similar characteristics, chemical compositions. The difference is that on Earth, water is everywhere, even in rocks, whereas the Moon is dry, but it&#8217;s pretty comparable.</p>
<p><strong>SK: Any testing using actual lunar regolith?<br />
</strong><strong>RG:</strong> Yes. Recently, China’s Chang&#8217;e-5 mission brought over a kilogram of regolith back. Researchers melted a sample of it and they showed that they could heat it with concentrated solar to sinter it and extract oxygen. So they&#8217;re doing work as well.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re actively working with private lander companies and NASA to try to launch and land a subscale version, like a mini, smaller version of this array that we&#8217;ve worked out as an initial proof of concept to do solar sintering and melting of the lunar surface.</p>
<p>NASA is funding commercial lunar and lander companies to land science and technology payloads on the Moon. One lander company was Firefly, it landed perfectly. Intuitive Machines landed a lander on the Moon twice, but both tipped over. But they were able to get some data and show that some technologies did function in their intended purpose.</p>
<p>Blue Origin is planning their own lunar lander for later this year, and there are several others after that.</p>
<p><strong>SK: But few companies exploring concentrated solar sintering on the Moon…<br />
</strong><strong>RG:</strong> Yes, I’m surprised more folks aren&#8217;t doing it. Concentrated solar is amazing for the Moon. Any thermal application is best served by concentrated solar. You don&#8217;t have conversion losses like with photovoltaics to convert sunlight to electricity and then into thermal energy. You just reflect the sunlight directly onto its intended location, and you have heat right away. As reliable as flipping a light switch on and off.</p>
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