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2026-09-02

We said no one was working on this. Someone is.

For the last two weeks our gap analysis has carried a sentence saying that the power-beaming field is fragmenting, with at least two mutually incompatible physical layers being flown or funded, and no venue where their interfaces are being reconciled.

The second half of that was wrong, and had been for about two years.

What we missed

LOGIC — the Lunar Operating Guidelines for Infrastructure Consortium — is sponsored by DARPA and managed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. It has over 900 members and exists, in its own words, to bring the lunar community together around "adopting, adapting and potentially authoring interoperability standards."

It has a Power working group. That group has ten numbered use cases, and each one carries a published status pipeline that ends in *Ready for SDO Review* — submission to standards development organisations.

Use case P5 is Wireless Rover Charge, last updated in May 2026:

> As a Power Consumer, I want to request power from the grid and receive power via power beaming at a specified location to charge my onboard battery pack.

Its assumptions distinguish short-range induction from "long distance (e.g. laser and microwave)". Its scenarios include human-rated transmission safety. And its working notes pose this question:

> The power beaming supplier said they delivered 100% of the requested power, but my vehicle's telemetry says it only received 80% of the requested energy. Who is responsible for the difference? Who mediates disputes?

Why we missed it

Every row in our survey asks a question of a standards body or a regulator — the ITU, the IEEE, CCSDS, ICNIRP, the FCC. Not one asked whether a consortium had taken the ground. A consortium is what did.

That is a flaw in the method rather than bad luck. A register that only interrogates the bodies that publish finished standards will systematically miss the places where standards are being drafted, and drafting is the stage where an interface is actually decided.

What still holds

No standard has been published. LOGIC's own P5 page is the evidence: under *Recommendations for Standards to Be Authored* it currently reads "In progress", and the existing standards it can point at are close-proximity induction and electric-vehicle charging — ISO/IEC 17568, SAE J2954, SAE J2847/6, IEEE 2030-2011. None of those governs a laser or a microwave beam over a kilometre.

So the absence of a published standard, which is what our survey was built to establish, is unaffected. What we asserted without establishing was the absence of *activity*, and that assertion is now withdrawn and recorded as withdrawn.

What we are doing about it

Our specification says in its own status section that where a recognised body opens relevant work, the document should be contributed there and the project archived — and that the authors would prefer that outcome to adoption of their own draft. We meant it. LOGIC has opened relevant work, so the next move is to take part in it rather than to publish alongside it.

If you are tracking this field and you were relying on our claim that nobody was coordinating it, correct that. And if you keep a register of your own, the lesson generalises: ask consortia, not only the bodies that publish.

Where to read it