Generating electricity on the Moon comes with inherent challenges.
For one, solar power can only be relied upon during the two-Earth-week-long lunar day, not during the equally long night. A different idea is being explored to use nuclear reactors to generate electricity, which comes with its own engineering challenges given the extreme conditions – for example, cooling such a power station, given the absence of an atmosphere.
Now, Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin claims it has come up with an entirely different solution with the help of a small startup called Istari Digital — and a big dose of AI, of course.
Space firm recently showed off a device Amazon Web Services re: Invent 2025 conference in Las Vegas Called TEAREX, or Thermal Energy Advanced Regolith Extraction. The company claims it could one day allow future astronauts to survive 14 days of freezing temperatures during lunar nights by extracting heat stored in lunar dust during the day using battery-like technology.
“TEAREX takes lunar regolith or moon dust from the surface of the Moon, circulates it through this chamber, and then extracts the heat through a lightweight heat exchanger,” Blue Origin Enterprise Tech VP William Brennan explained while holding a sleek, approximately 12-inch device during the event. “And then, run it through this cylinder to protect the rest of the machine from sensitive and abrasive rocks.”
“This heating cycle is reversed during the lunar day to recharge the regolith for use during the following night, turning the moon dust into a battery,” he said.
It’s definitely a good idea – if it actually works as promised. But instead of exploring the feasibility of the product or going into detail about how it actually works, the company wasted no time in claiming how the device was designed by AI. A quick look at one With Amazon press release Barely mentions TEAREX, and instead brags about how its agentic AI models “accelerate lunar hardware development by 75 percent while democratizing innovation across 70 percent of the workforce.”
Brennan claimed that an in-house AI agent “helped us with detailed requirements,” while “another agent helped us create the system architecture.”
“TEAREX is a great example of what we see the future of engineering teams at Blue,” he concluded during his presentation. “Small teams of experts are working with larger teams of AI agents to accomplish tasks tens and orders of magnitude faster than ever before.”
Istari Digital CEO Will Roper, who was once assistant secretary of the Air Force during Donald Trump’s first term, also seemed largely uninterested in knowing whether or not the battery actually worked. Say cnbc In an interview he said that the real breakthrough was the way his company handled hallucinations by creating “fences around the playing field” for its AI.
The small startup’s AI agents certainly run on Amazon Web Services servers, serving a complex web of Bezos’ personal business interests.
“On that playing field, AI can produce whatever it wants,” he said. “In the case of Blue Origin’s Moon battery, (it) doesn’t tell you that the design was good, but it tells us that all the requirements were met, standards were met, things that you have to check before they go on.”
Which leaves an obvious question: does it actually work, or is TEAREX a figment of the imagination of multiple AI agents? How much energy can one actually extract from the heat released from moon dust via a heat exchanger? We have yet to see the product in action, let alone a working prototype, technical specifications or white paper.
Make no mistake, a device that can magically extract energy from sun-baked moon dust sounds like an exciting alternative to solar panels and nuclear power generators for future astronauts looking to survive a long lunar night. But given the companies’ focus on AI agents, we have a troubling feeling that TEAREX is more hot air – or regolith – designed primarily to justify Amazon’s massive AI spending.
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