The Battery Behind Artemis II: How IndX Powered NASA's Return to the Moon

Challenge

When the mission changes, the battery starts over.

The Artemis program is NASA's effort to return humans to the Moon and build toward eventual crewed missions to Mars. The Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle sits at the center of that program: a spacecraft designed to carry astronauts beyond low Earth orbit, around the Moon, and safely home.

Orion's battery system is not a secondary component. It provides electrical power to the crew module. As Dan Grabowski, Director of Engineering Automation at IndX, described it:

The margin for failure on this program was not measured in downtime or lost revenue. It was measured in lives.

When EaglePicher received the contract to manufacture the Orion battery, the scope of the challenge became clear quickly. NASA's requirements flowed down through Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor, and they were exacting. The battery assembly had to fit within a fixed structural envelope, a defined physical space on the spacecraft that could not be exceeded by a single millimeter. It had to meet strict weight limits, where every fraction of a pound was treated as consequential.

The battery also had to manage thermal performance in an environment where the normal rules do not apply. On Earth, electronics shed heat into the surrounding air. In space, there is no air. The only way to reject heat from the battery is through a cold plate: a metal surface with refrigeration lines running through it, mounted directly to the spacecraft structure. The entire battery housing had to be designed so that each cell and electronic component maintained proper thermal contact with that cold plate, keeping temperatures within a narrow operating window throughout the mission.

Beyond size, weight, and thermal performance, the design also had to account for conditions unique to spaceflight: structural loads during launch, sealing against the vacuum of space, electromagnetic interference, and exposure to solar radiation.

EaglePicher's engineers are specialists in electrochemistry and cell design. But this project required mechanical engineering, structural analysis, and thermal analysis at the full system level, capabilities the company did not have in-house. They needed a partner with deep engineering design expertise, experience in aerospace battery systems, and the ability to stay embedded in a program that would demand sustained, iterative collaboration over years.

IndX had already built that relationship. Through prior aerospace battery projects with EaglePicher's predecessor organization (Yardney), IndX's design automation team had established a track record strong enough that a competitive bid was unnecessary. The work was awarded directly.

Project Activities

More About the Project

The problem few firms could solve.

What made this project distinctive was not just the technical difficulty of any single design cycle, but the sustained complexity of staying embedded in a program that kept moving.

Each time NASA updated its requirements (a revised weight budget, a change to the available space, an updated thermal profile), the engineering response was not a patch or an adjustment. It was a redesign from the ground up. New models, new analyses, new manufacturing documentation, new formal reviews. Four times over, with the same rigor applied to the fourth iteration as the first.

IndX was originally selected because of a long-standing relationship with EaglePicher's predecessor organization and a proven track record on aerospace battery projects. But the reason the engagement lasted seven years was not the relationship alone. It was the depth of capability. The project required engineers who could design a system-level battery assembly, conduct structural and thermal FEA under space-grade requirements, factor in manufacturability at every step, and defend every decision in formal reviews with NASA and Lockheed Martin in the room. That combination of mechanical design, simulation, manufacturing awareness, and aerospace rigor is not widely available.

The Orion battery project also reflects the broader reality of how crewed spaceflight programs operate. Requirements are never truly locked. They evolve as the vehicle matures, as mission architecture changes, and as integration decisions ripple through every subsystem. The engineering teams working at the component level must be prepared to absorb those changes without compounding risk, without losing traceability, and without slowing the program.