With the successful landing of the Blue Ghost mission on March 2, 2025 along with growing rivalry between the United States and China on their future lunar presence, there’s been renewed interest in putting landers on the Moon.
For most of them, though, there’s an enormous obstacle: surviving the long dark lunar nights. Until now, that’s limited the length and scope of these missions, and even created interest in more exotic fixes, like lunar fission reactors.
But one Canadian startup in Montreal is proposing a different solution: beaming the power to the lunar surface from a network of satellites in lunar orbit. The company is called Volta Space Technologies, and they’ve already received interest in their tech.
SpaceQ reached out to Volta and received comments from Volta Space Technologies’ CEO Justin Zipkin about the company and their technology.
Surviving the lunar night
To understand the technology, it’s best to understand the problem.
The lunar night lasts for two weeks, is usually near-complete darkness, and is usually accompanied by massive temperature swings: from a daytime temperature of 120 degrees celsius to a nighttime temperature of -240 degrees. Those are tough conditions for any piece of equipment to survive, and current landers need to be either built for a short-term mission that lasts until the night makes the lander inoperable, or have to devote weight and space towards being able to survive over those cold weeks until the daytime comes again.
And, in many cases, they may not even have that much time. One of the key determinants of the feasibility of building actual infrastructure on the Moon is access to water, which can be turned into air to sustain human life and (potentially) propellants like hydrogen and oxygen. While the search for water on the Moon is still ongoing, the odds are that the largest supplies will be in craters in the polar regions; areas that either receive little sunlight or practically none.
The lack of sunlight in those frigid polar craters is exactly why they’re so promising as sources for water ice, but it also means that getting power will be a serious and ongoing challenge. Whoever solves that challenge might end up with a tremendously advantageous position in the international race to establish a presence on the Moon.
Beaming power from lunar Orbit
Justin Zipkin said that this was what they hoped to address. “Current solutions [like batteries or radioisotopes] are built for one-off missions,” he said, and can “increase the mission cost by over $200M USD due to the mass requirements, regulatory requirements, and mass required for shielding and thermal regulation.” We’ve come to accept those “backpack solutions” because we’ve only had one rover or lander on the Moon at a time. But as the human presence on the Moon scales up, we may need something more robust.
Volta’s solution: a “lunar energy grid.” Their goal is to build a lunar satellite network called LightGrid: a network of satellites in low lunar orbit that will collect solar power, and then beam it down via lasers to equipment on the lunar surface. The satellites will “wirelessly distribute power directly to a photovoltaic receiver,” called LightPort, which would be mounted on customers’ equipment on the lunar surface, including landers, rovers, and potentially even lunar mining systems.
The system is designed “to distribute power over a distance of 200 km and land all photons on a receiver with a 30 cm diameter,” Zipkin said, adding that “Volta builds and designs all systems in house, with some being designed in collaboration with strategic partners.” The LightPort is lightweight, under 3 kg, and (Zipkin said) “can convert nearly 100% of optical power delivered by the LightGrid,” with about 45% converted to electrical power and the rest turned to “waste heat” which can be used to mitigate the effects of the cold lunar night and reduce the need for heavy thermal shielding.
Granted, building a network of satellites to power lunar landers may seem like a big and expensive task. But, Zipkin said, this kind of “lunar energy grid” mirrors how terrestrial grids work. “The way we have affordable energy at our homes and offices isn’t because energy infrastructure is cheap,” he said, but because it is “shared by millions of people.” With this lunar grid, Zipkin said that they’ve also focused on making it “scaleable and enable economies of scale,” including allowing for satellites to power multiple customers at a time, and having smooth handoffs from one passing satellite to the next.
Since “it costs 1/3rd the price to put mass in lunar orbit vs. the lunar surface,” Zipkin said, and since each satellite can deliver power to a number of lunar vehicles and installations, this move towards relying on orbital power could reduce the cost of surviving the lunar night to “as low as $500K” for their customers. It all depends on scale: Zipkin said that “the more customers that use Volta’s energy grid…the cheaper it will end up being for everyone.”
There’s also the possibility of using the network for optical telecommunications as well; Zipkin said that three satellites working in tandem could provide “Positioning, Navigation and Timing services” as well as power transmission, which will help with “lowering the cost of critical lunar infrastructure.”
NASA, CSA and NATO Awards
One goal, Zipkin said, is to “help the Artemis program scale up and speed up operations by addressing the single largest bottleneck: affordable and globally available power.” The potential usefulness of this technology for government clients doesn’t appear to be lost on those same potential clients. Volta has received several government awards across several domains.
In fact, one key indicator of government interest happened early in the company’s existence. Zipkin and Volta CTO Paolo Pino started investigating the feasibility of this kind of system as part of a pitch competition during an International Space University course. After seeing interest from lunar robotics companies, the team applied for the 2021 NASA Watts on the Moon challenge in partnership with Astrobotic.
“To our surprise,” Zipkin said, “we were one of the winners,” and the victory “gave us the confidence and credibility to pursue Volta full time as a business.”
Their NASA prize was worth $50,000, and they followed that with an initial seed funding round in 2022. They also brought Paul Damphousse aboard as COO. Damphousse who had led the American National Security Space Office’s investigation into Space-Based solar power back in 2009. (Damphousse is also the president of Volta’s US subsidiary.)
More recently, they’ve received two key government supports. The first is a CAD $978,822 award from the CSA’s Space Technology Development Program (STDP). The second is membership in the 2026 cohort of the NATO Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), which includes €100,000 (CAD $162K) in funding along with the potential for “funds for testing, evaluation, validation & verification activities” through “competitive processes.”
The CSA award, part of the STDP “Advanced Technologies” award set, was to “develop a receiver that could capture energy beamed from satellites in lunar orbit, providing a reliable power source for longer missions.” The award announcement said that the project will “design, test, and demonstrate the first version of the receiver, including a small-scale model to be sent to the Moon.”
Zipkin explained that the CSA award will involve creating a smaller version of the LightPort to be added to a lunar lander, “enabling this product to reach TRL 8/9.” He said that the demonstration is “crucial,” clients will see that the hardware is “flight tested and will have flight heritage.”
While there won’t be a laser sent to the Moon for testing, Zipkin explained, “we are able to test all critical functionality of the LightPort by testing its ability to convert power from the Sun,” comparing its efficiency to the efficiencies seen in terrestrial testing. This mission will be in partnership with Firefly, and the test version of the LightPort will be a part of their Blue Ghost 2 lander.
According to Firefly, the Blue Ghost 2 mission will launch “as early as late 2026”.
Defence applications
The NATO award, however, points to a wholly different application for the technology.
As seen in Volta’s release on the award, the NATO DIANA award is focused on how “optical power delivery can enable persistent aerial operations without landing or swapping batteries”; in other words, allowing for autonomous drones to operate for longer periods of time than traditional battery power would normally allow.
Specifically, the NATO award is for “persistent drone flight and emergency power in extremely cold environments.” Volta’s release said that it will allow for “greater situational awareness, search and rescue capabilities, and operational continuity in harsh and strategically important environments,” adding that “as geopolitical interest in the Arctic intensifies and extreme-environment operations expand, resilient energy technologies are essential foundations for security and scientific discovery.”
In the release, Zipkin said that the selection affirms the company’s goal of “delivering power reliably, safely, and at long range,” and that “capabilities built to serve the coldest environment in the solar system are now proving equally valuable for the world’s most challenging defense environments.”
In his comments to SpaceQ, Zipkin said that this was partially exploratory. “We’re getting paid by NATO to learn more about their needs and requirements,” he said, “to meet with key stakeholders, iterate on our designs and demonstrate the technology.” He said that they’re “excited for this opportunity to continue learning from the customers.”
In many ways this echoes the partial pivot of other space-related companies to terrestrial defence work, notably including CSMC’s recent rebrand to “Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation” and new focus on terrestrial defence applications of their LEUNR micro-reactor technology. (CSMC is also part of the 2026 NATO DIANA cohort.)
When asked about the defence side, Zipkin said that the terrestrial applications arose almost naturally. Volta found that they were able to “leverage our innovations to problem sets that exist on Earth” with “very few modifications,” Zipkin said, and that as they’ve “become really good at delivering power from an advantaged location to a disadvantaged location,” they better understand how to “apply that philosophy to robotics on Earth.”
They’re still at early stages, “focusing on small demonstrations for terrestrial applications in Q3 of 2025,” but Zipkin said that “we definitely want to ramp that up,” and that “there are a plethora of applications and use cases that we fit squarely into.” In fact, it may not always involve beaming power at all: Zipkin said that “the ability to rapidly and accurately point and redirect a laser beam is highly valuable,” and that’s what their power-delivery technology is teaching them.
It is possible that there may be civilian applications, too: Zipkin said that ”as the number of robotic devices increases in our world and edge computing increases, the energy demand for those systems will continue to rise,” and potential uses for power-beaming may rise as well.