NASA funds 18 visionary space concepts with $3.2 million in grants

NASA has selected 18 new concepts for early-stage technology development through its Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. The awards, announced on July 29, 2026, total $3.2 million, with each project receiving up to $175,000 for a nine-month initial investigation. The funded ideas span from lunar exploration to interstellar travel and are not official NASA missions. According to Greg Stover, director of the Advanced Research and Technology division at NASA Headquarters, achieving the agency’s ambitious vision for space exploration requires great leaps beyond incremental advances, and these awards foster the kind of innovation the world needs. Phillip Williams, NIAC’s acting program executive, noted that the program allows NASA to germinate seeds of ideas that could benefit future space missions and the nation’s aerospace economy. Several 2026 awardees focus on sustained lunar presence, including a system to support hovering robots exploring lava tubes, a method to manage temperatures for small mobile explorers, and a way to incorporate radioisotopic heat sources into suits to keep astronauts warm during the Moon’s two-week-long nights. Other concepts tackle challenges on Venus, such as hardening instruments for longer missions, and studying planetary rings: one would use a swarm of 10,000 tiny satellites to map Saturn’s rings, while another would collect samples from rings around Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Some projects look beyond the solar system, exploring ways to power interstellar spacecraft, map continents on exoplanets, observe photon rings around black holes, and detect gravitational waves to explain galaxy formation. Earth-focused ideas include using spaceborne dust to reduce solar radiation and raising awareness about orbital debris. The NIAC Fellows will investigate their concepts and identify challenges and opportunities for further development. The selected researchers and their projects include Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory with DimSun, a dust cloud to reduce solar insolation; David Bugby of JPL with CANVAS for Venus adaptability; A.C. Charania of Zeno Power Systems with EARENDIL for astronaut radioisotope use in nighttime and icy landscapes; Anish Damodaran of University of Central Florida with PS21 for submillimeter space interferometry; Artur Davoyan of UCLA with coilable stacked solar sails; Daniel Drew of University of Hawaii with SPARK for solid-state propulsion in karst; Gilly Elor of Stone Aerospace with LUX, a power-over-fiber lunar underground explorer; Zhaoyan Liu of NASA Ames with quantum wind lidar; Jeff Nosanov of Orbital Velocity with OBLIVIAN for black hole light observation; Keunhan Park of University of Utah with plasmon-enhanced radioisotope power for interstellar missions; Austin Phoenix of Virginia Tech with ECLIPSE for lunar insulator environmental control; Marco Quadrelli of JPL with PRAXIS for planetary rings sampling; Michael Rubenstein of Northwestern University with steerable femtosat constellations for Saturn exploration; Benjamin Schafer of Rarefied Technologies with photophoretic tracers for near-space remote sensing; David Smith of Duke University with robotically assembled metamaterials for space situational awareness; Pablo Sobron of SETI Institute with Interworld Slingshot Resource Surveys; and Paul Stankus of Brookhaven Science Associates with two projects: one for mapping alien continents via optical VLBI and another for precision astrometry to detect gravitational waves.