Informal Proceedings of Workshop held October 16, 2025
The Aerospace Corporation’s Space Safety Institute convened a virtual workshop to discuss safety and policy challenges for Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion (SNPP). The workshop brought together more than 100 participants from industry, academia, and government to discuss ideas for overcoming these challenges to make SNPP a reality.
The importance of SNPP is increasingly recognized for civil, commercial and national security missions in lunar surface, cislunar, and Earth orbit applications where its high power density and solar independence make it desirable. The first session of the workshop focused on policy challenges and potential solutions. At the national policy level, there is a strong need for clear policy goals and drivers to guide national efforts, but they cannot be too prescriptive. The key is to have a minimum viable policy that addresses the most important issues that need to be resolved early in the process and then iterates over time to resolve additional issues further along. Participants identified that the most pressing policy issues as liability and potential indemnification (especially for commercial SNPP systems), export controls, and clarifying safety zones for the lunar surface. Constructive U.S. participation in United Nations efforts, including private sector perspectives, can help inform the international community about U.S. policies and plans, shape other countries’ own efforts, and lay the foundation for international norms and standards.
The second session of the workshop focused on technical challenges and potential technical solutions. Safety is crucial and needs to be factored into any space nuclear program from the start and through the life cycle including operations and ultimately disposal. It was recommended to utilize newer regulatory guidance such as NSPM-20 to perform simplified, probabilistic, system-level safety analyses to identify bounding cases rather than high-fidelity, highly specific, high-precision calculations as long as the system fits within the safety envelope. As an alternative to the traditional monolithic approach to safety where the spacecraft must contain all systems required to mitigate failures, today it is conceivable that a system-of-systems approach could achieve this guidance through corresponding systems and spacecraft that provide necessary safety mitigations. There are also limited appropriate test facilities that could test SNPP fission systems end-to-end.
The workshop recommended a series of next steps including developing a common SNPP lexicon, improving digital tool usage, and driving to a near-term simplified in-space demonstration as part of a cohesive tech development roadmap led by a national government champion.