Sustained lunar operations have a power problem: the lunar night lasts fourteen Earth days. Solar arrays on the surface go dark for two weeks at a time, and carrying enough batteries to ride it out costs mass most missions don't have.
Beam it from orbit.
Space-based solar power satellites in cislunar space can harvest sunlight continuously and transmit it down to surface assets exactly when they're in darkness. As that infrastructure moves from concept studies toward shared constellations serving many users, the hard question changes: who gets the power, and when?
Scheduling power like we schedule compute.
Our framework treats power delivery as an orchestration problem. It formulates allocation as a linear optimization that maximizes weighted energy delivery across clients — aware of orbital dynamics, line-of-sight windows, battery state, and the day/night structure of the lunar cycle. Client priorities encode mission criticality, trading fairness against efficiency deliberately instead of accidentally. Power is transmitted only when a client can see a satellite and actually needs it — during lunar night, when it's most valuable.
Tested against real orbits.
We evaluated the scheduler in a high-fidelity simulation — orbital propagation and contact prediction from NASA's GMAT — with a four-satellite low-lunar-orbit constellation serving six surface clients placed at historic Surveyor landing sites. Across 24-hour windows and full 28-day lunar cycles, the scheduler balances delivery despite uneven contact opportunities: satellites hold stable state of charge, and even poorly-placed clients receive meaningful energy relative to their access.
Why it matters to us.
Scheduling scarce, moving resources against orbital mechanics is the same problem whether the resource is compute or kilowatts. This work extends the ToDare playbook to cislunar space — and doubles as a design tool, exposing the tradeoffs between coverage, storage, and fairness before anyone commits hardware. Orbit first. The Moon next.
FUNDED BY GEORGIA TECH RESEARCH INSTITUTE IR&D.
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