MIT teams win NASA awards for lunar base infrastructure

MIT teams have been awarded five prizes at NASA’s 2026 RASC-AL Forum for integrated moon-base infrastructure designs.

• Main announcement: MIT student teams ECLIPSE, MELIORA, and CHEESEBURGER won a total of five awards at NASA’s 2026 RASC-AL competition — including first and second overall — for designs of a lunar power grid, communications/positioning constellation, and regolith-to-resource processing pipeline. ECLIPSE delivered a reference grid sized for an initial 120 kilowatts, featuring buried 20 kW CARROT microreactors and a target availability of >99.995% (fewer than 27 minutes downtime per year); MELIORA scales from 3 to 23 satellites, returns >100 megabits per second via free-space optical links and provides ~10 m positioning; CHEESEBURGER proposes five robotic payloads (SWISS, BRIOCHES, BACON, GRILLED MEAT, AVOCADO) to produce oxygen, metals, and bricks from regolith.
• Context and details: The projects were developed by ~35 students across eight MIT departments and Wellesley College since fall 2025, advised by faculty including Olivier de Weck, Kerri Cahoy, and Jeffrey Hoffman, supported in part by NASA, Massachusetts Space Grant, MIT AeroAstro, and the MIT Space Resources Workshop, and framed to validate designs on the Moon before extension to Mars; NASA plans to begin landing first base elements in 2027 and expects months-long lunar surface stays by the early 2030s.