First Commercial Nuclear-Powered Satellite Reaches Orbit on Falcon 9 Rideshare
City Labs' BOHR cubesat became the world's first commercially built nuclear-powered satellite to reach orbit, launching early on July 7 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9. The mission marks the first commercially designed and operated spacecraft to carry nuclear technology into space, a domain long reserved for government programs.
The satellite flew as one of 81 payloads on SpaceX's Transporter-17 rideshare mission, which lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Falcon 9 began delivering its payloads to their various orbits roughly 50 minutes after liftoff, and the booster landed on a ship at sea after deployment.
BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, is a pathfinder demonstration from Florida-based City Labs testing the company's proprietary NanoTritium betavoltaic micropower source in space for the first time. The device harnesses beta particles emitted from the radioactive decay of tritium, which are converted directly to electricity using a semiconductor. The approach differs from radioisotope thermoelectric generators, such as those on NASA's Voyager probes, which produce power from the heat of plutonium cores.
The cubesat's tritium core is not its primary power source. BOHR still relies on solar power for general operations. City Labs states the technology could enable spacecraft capable of operating for long periods in places current vehicles cannot, such as permanently shadowed regions at the moon's poles. The company noted NASA's Artemis missions have focused on the lunar south pole, where water ice offers potential for resource extraction and long-term habitation, and that NASA is funding nuclear reactor technology to support that goal.
BOHR and City Labs' tritium development were funded under a Department of Defense contract. The mission is the first nuclear-powered mission approved under the Federal Aviation Administration's nuclear launch process established by National Security Presidential Memorandum-20, issued in 2019. City Labs highlighted tritium's low radiation output, stating its power systems are engineered for safe handling, transportation, and integration within standard commercial launch environments.
"This is a historic step for commercial nuclear power in space," said City Labs CEO Peter Cabauy. The company described BOHR as "the first commercial answer" to the challenge of powering operations in regions unsuited to solar energy. Though the NanoTritium source cannot produce nearly enough energy to power something like a moon base, City Labs sees its application scaling to eventually reach that capability.
Cabauy said the mission shows that "safe, compact, and regulatory-approved nuclear power systems are ready for routine commercial deployment." City Labs hopes the success of BOHR will pave the way for more nuclear-powered spacecraft to support national defense and private space missions in the future.
What to watch is whether City Labs' demonstration leads to additional nuclear-powered spacecraft, and whether the company can scale its NanoTritium technology toward higher-power applications it has described.