In May 2025, Roscosmos and CNSA signed a memorandum to build a power plant for the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), and the Russian Academy of Sciences approved the concept for the Russian segment of the station; in July 2026, Russian Ambassador Igor Morgulov said implementation of the intergovernmental ILRS agreement was proceeding intensively and that experts were still assigning tasks across joint missions.
The technical significance is the shift from abstract cooperation to core infrastructure: a dedicated lunar power system is a prerequisite for sustained operations, robotics, communications, and eventually human presence; if the reported 2026–2035 construction phase holds, ILRS is moving toward the same classes of systems the Ark would need for habitat resilience, energy continuity, and distributed operations in a hostile vacuum environment.
The Ark team should monitor ILRS power-plant architecture, Russian segment design choices, and any announced mission division between China and Russia, because these will reveal lunar-grade standards for nuclear or other continuous power, surface logistics, and governance of multinational off-world infrastructure; prioritize study of their energy redundancy, maintenance assumptions, and timeline credibility against the stated 2036 completion target.