If Anyone Can Put a Functioning Nuclear Reactor On the Moon, It Is the Terrified-of-the-Subway Man

“The lunar night is challenging from a technical perspective, so having a source of power such as this nuclear reactor, which operates independent of the Sun, is an enabling option for long-term exploration and science efforts on the Moon,” one NASA official said in early 2024, when the initial design phase had been completed. At that point, the idea was to have a theoretically functional 40-kilowatt reactor ready for the launchpad by “the early 2030s,” with a long-term idea of proving the concept for Mars travel as well. As reported by Politico and other outlets, the news on Monday is that Duffy, recently appointed as interim NASA administrator to go along with his day job, is looking to accelerate that timeline.

And hey, why not: if anyone can squeeze a novel piece of technology out of a budget-crunched space agency, and put it on the surface of a celestial body on which no human has set foot in more than half a century, and do so within the next five years, it is the reality television star who is petrified to set foot on the New York City subway.

“It is about winning the second space race,” a senior NASA official told Politico, by way of reassurance that a man whose primary job is to appear on television and assert, over and over, how scary the urban areas that are home to about 80 percent of Americans really are can prevail in such a competition. The updated reactor directive will apparently increase the ambition from a 40-kilowatt power source to 100 kilowatts (still very tiny even compared to nuclear reactors on, say, submarines, let alone actual power plants in the hundreds of megawatts), and insist that companies awarded new contracts to build it will be ready by 2030, when China plans to land its first person on the lunar surface. It also instructs NASA to designate a leader for the initiative, but let’s be clear: who better to really pull the nuclear strings than a man who rose to prominence on Real World: Boston?

Look, space is hard. This particular project may not be quite as far-fetched, as, say, the space hotel whose opening is surely imminent, but the very obviously safest bet is that human-induced nuclear fission will not be occurring on the moon’s surface within half a decade. But hey, as the man in charge of two separate federal agencies can attest, fear can be a potent motivator!