During the talk about the Transporter-17 mission out of Vandenberg SFB yesterday, what was probably the most technically interesting payload on the Rideshare mission wasn't mentioned at all.
The satellite from Miami-based City Labs is named BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, and it launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission Tuesday alongside 80 other payloads. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket released the BOHR satellite into an orbit between 350 and 400 miles (nearly 600 km) in altitude.
City Labs bills the BOHR mission as “the world’s first commercial nuclear-powered satellite and first nuclear CubeSat.” CubeSats are modest in scale, and images released by City Labs suggest BOHR is built on a “1U” CubeSat platform, a cubical design measuring about the same size as a softball. BOHR’s power source is a nuclear betavoltaic battery that generates electricity from the decay of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen.
It probably goes without saying that City Labs is rather proud of BOHR and talks it up by calling it “a historic step for commercial nuclear power in space” and “BOHR demonstrates that safe, compact, and regulatory-approved nuclear power systems are ready for routine commercial deployment. This capability enables persistent, always-on payload operations that are not constrained by sunlight or battery life,” to quote Peter Cabauy, CEO of City Labs, in a statement.
While this photo doesn't look to be as small as a softball, this the BOHR test cubesat system.
This is a test mission for City Labs, who plan to use the experimental NanoTritium power generator in demonstration mode to supply electricity to a payload onboard the BOHR CubeSat.
The spacecraft itself uses conventional solar power for regular operations, the company said. Betavoltaic batteries are best suited for low-power applications that require a reliable, long-duration source of electricity. These use cases include remote terrestrial sensors—such as in undersea or polar locations—and instrumentation for secure communications. City Labs is also studying the use of its NanoTritium technology to power implantable medical devices.
Those of us who live near the Cape have seen protestors for anything that can be considered nuclear powered and the BOHR module went through all the tests to clear it for flight. It's important to point out that the company’s betavoltaic power systems are small—in the nanowatt to microwatt range—far short of the electricity required to power a smartphone, much less a large spacecraft or a Moon base.
BOHR was the first commercial nuclear mission to pass through the Federal Aviation Administration’s new nuclear launch approval process. The FAA authorized City Labs to launch the BOHR mission last September.
[T]he BOHR satellite carries just a tiny amount of radioactive material, and the tritium isotope decays more quickly than plutonium or uranium. It’s also less toxic than other well-known nuclear fuels. “Tritium emits a weak form of radiation, a low-energy beta particle similar to an electron. The tritium radiation does not travel very far in air and cannot penetrate the skin,” the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says on its website.
The small amount of power the BOHR reactor can generate underlines the idea that this must be the first step in the development of flight-rated reactors that produce orders of magnitude more power than this one - millions to billions of times more power. How big those steps can be point toward how long it will be before reactors capable of generating usable numbers of watts can be used.
It's a Pathfinder for future reactor systems that will be tested and used in space.
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