(Zero Hedge)—NASA and the Department of Energy signed a new space nuclear agreement Thursday, putting another piece of Washington’s reactor ambitions on paper while private developers race to meet some of the near-term goals.
The nuclear energy renaissance story has been increasingly linked to the buildout of data centers for AI. NASA is reminding folks that ChatGPT is not the only customer for fission.
Signed by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, the MOU, “Accelerating American Leadership in Space Nuclear Power and Propulsion,” takes effect November 1st. The MOU covers all aspects of getting nuclear energy off the ground, including research, testing, launch integration, and fuel production.
This newer version of the Space Nuclear Power agreement replaces the previous MOU between NASA and the DOE, which reaches its 10-year expiration at the end of October.
Most of the MOU should not be news to our readers, though. The agreement signed this week is more of a collection of the previous agreements announced in January and March of this year.
The MOU covers three programs:
- Space Reactor-1 Freedom, a fission-powered spacecraft that will demonstrate nuclear electric propulsion, slated to launch toward Mars in 2028
- Lunar Reactor-1, the fission surface power system meant to keep the lights on at NASA’s planned Moon Base, with a launch-ready unit due by 2030 under the December 2025 executive order “Ensuring American Space Superiority.”
- DOE will keep supplying radioisotope power and heater units for missions such as Dragonfly, which heads to Saturn’s moon Titan in 2028
“Adm. Hyman Rickover understood that nuclear power would fundamentally change what was possible at sea,” Isaacman said, per Payload. “SR-1 Freedom is our Nautilus, and she will launch in 2028.”
January saw the original announcement of the goal for reactors on the moon by 2030. By March, Isaacman was announcing NASA’s ambitions for nuclear-powered Mars spacecraft and goals for getting a reactor in the air by 2028.
March also included one of the first price tag estimates we got for the program, with NASA claiming the reactor on the moon could cost approximately $20 billion over the next 7 years to develop and deploy.
Nuclear’s position as the leading source of energy production in space is almost without competition or disagreement. While there is a time and a place for solar production, certain locations on the Moon, and both the travel and operations on Mars, will unquestionably require the resilience only offered by nuclear reactors.
The Space Force is also pursuing its own nuclear and space applications. Last month, Antares announced a $161 million Strategic Breakthrough award. The assignment is to demonstrate the company’s R1-S reactor on the ground and integrate it with a spacecraft for flight certification.
Antares also plans to use its electricity-producing Mark-1 reactor to power an operational ground-to-space asset, with testing scheduled for 2027. That follows Mark-0’s June criticality demonstration under DOE authorization.
The space variant is adapted from Antares’ terrestrial R1 architecture. The company told Nuclear News its first version targets at least 35 kilowatts of electrical output, using different materials, shielding and heat-rejection arrangements for space.
Not to be outdone by a group of startups, Lockheed Martin is leaning into the same opportunity.
In our January coverage of the initial NASA nuclear announcement, we covered how Lockheed Martin was one of the companies originally involved in the reactor-on-the-moon projects from 2022. It looks like their ambition to stay relevant is still going strong.
Lockheed also participated in an investment round with Radiant Nuclear earlier this year. Radiant is developing a transportable gas-cooled microreactor that may be developed for extraterrestrial applications.
The nuclear trade is bigger than the next hyperscaler power deal. Space and defense are already generating contracts for nuclear companies and equipment suppliers.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
