On 2026-09-16, BAE Systems announced it received $16 million in Defense Production Act Title III funding via the U.S. Department of War’s Warfighting Investments, Resourcing, and Execution directorate to demonstrate and qualify its RH45 radiation-hardened 45-nanometer technology. The stated goal is to reestablish the RH45 ASIC Storefront, with production tied to GlobalFoundries’ 45 nm silicon-on-insulator process in Malta, New York.
For lunar habitation and preservation, the strategic value is hardware survivability: radiation-hardened 45 nm chips reduce the risk of computer failure in natural and strategic radiation environments, which is directly relevant to life-support controllers, power management, robotics, communications, and archival systems. Reconstituting a domestic RH45 storefront also strengthens redundancy in the supply chain, lowering dependence on fragile foreign fabrication pathways for mission-critical electronics.
The Ark team should track qualification milestones, store a copy of RH45 process and design documentation, and assess whether this platform can support radiation-tolerant avionics, sensor nodes, and autonomous maintenance systems for lunar infrastructure. Priority research: compare RH45 against alternative rad-hard nodes for mass, power, verification burden, and producibility under constrained off-world manufacturing.
The key signal is that the U.S. is investing to restore scalable, domestically producible radiation-hardened microelectronics for space missions, which is a direct enabler of resilient lunar civilization hardware.