A nuclear reactor designed for space missions passed its final ground testing, NASA announced Wednesday at a press conference held at its Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Kilopower nuclear power plant project was aimed toward providing power during missions of extended duration to the Earth’s moon, to Mars and beyond, Fox News reported.
Project leaders said that the reactor’s performance during its final 28-hour, full-power test exceeded all expectations. The reactor’s testing was completed on March 21 inside a vacuum chamber at the Nevada National Security Site, about 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
“Really everything ran perfectly during the test,” said Kilopower lead engineer Marc Gibson, according to the Review-Journal.
For decades, unmanned space expeditions have been required to rely on small nuclear power plants to generate electricity during missions where solar energy isn’t possible, such as in deep space or at the moon’s polar regions.
But future manned missions will require ever-greater energy supplies. To meet those needs, NASA teamed up with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop the Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology (KRUSTY).
"We threw everything we could at this reactor, in terms of nominal and off-normal operating scenarios, and KRUSTY passed with flying colors," said David Poston, chief reactor designer at the National Nuclear Security Administration's Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to Fox News.
The reactor itself is self-regulating and needs neither a coolant nor a control system.
“We let the physics do the work by making the reactor design simple,” Poston said.
The reactor is fueled by a solid block of highly enriched uranium alloy and is surprisingly small. The reactor’s core is about the size of a roll of paper towels.
The next step will be to see how the system performs in space.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.