On 2026-05-17, CGTN reported that China and Russia had deepened cooperation on the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), with the May 2025 CNSA-Roscosmos memorandum specifically covering construction of a power station for the project. The reporting places the ILRS inside a broader Chinese program already involving 17 countries and international organizations and more than 50 research institutions, with a basic station targeted for 2035 and an expanded phase by 2045.
The technical significance is energy: a lunar power station is the enabling layer for habitation, robotics, communications, and sustained industrial work at the Moon’s surface. A credible power architecture reduces dependence on fragile solar-only systems, supports wintering crews or autonomous operations, and materially improves the odds of long-term lunar preservation capacity, emergency sheltering, and off-world continuity after Earth-scale catastrophe.
Ark priority is to track whether the China-Russia stack converges on a reactor-based or other high-reliability power architecture, what launch cadence they achieve, and whether ILRS standards mature into reusable norms for lunar habitat power, thermal control, and remote operations. The team should map ILRS milestones against 2035 and 2045 targets, monitor partner expansion beyond Russia, and study any resulting specifications as candidate inputs for Ark redundancy, power resilience, and sealed-civilization design.