NASA has just placed 18 small bets on some very big ideas on the future of space travel. The agency’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program announced its 2026 Phase I awards on July 29, handing out a combined $3.2 million to researchers chasing technologies that sound more like science fiction than agency paperwork. These include solar sails that unfurl like party favors, robots that tunnel under lunar ice, and a plan to dim the sun itself over a targeted patch of sky. Three of the 18 award-winners are Indian-origin researchers, continuing a long pattern of Indian-American scientists showing up at the frontier of NASA’s most experimental work.
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What is NASA’s NIAC, and why is it investing in the future of space travel?
NIAC is NASA’s innovation incubator. It doesn’t fund missions, it funds ideas that are too early, too weird, or too unproven for anything else. Each Phase I award provides up to $175,000 for a nine-month feasibility study, letting researchers stress-test a concept before it has any hope of becoming real hardware.
As Greg Stover, director of the Advanced Research and Technology division at NASA Headquarters, put it: achieving NASA’s ambitions for the Moon, Mars, and deep space “will require more than incremental technological advancement. It means we need great leaps.”
Most NIAC-funded ideas never fly. The program exists to find the rare concept worth funding further, by first letting it fail cheaply on paper rather than expensively in orbit.
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The three Indian-origin NIAC fellows of 2026:
Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay — Dimming the sun with a cloud of dust
Bandyopadhyay, a robotics technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is investigating whether a controllable cloud of dust could reduce solar insolation over a specific area. This concept called DimSun, is rooted in earlier geoengineering research on space-based solar radiation management.
It’s his second turn as a NIAC fellow; his 2020 award funded work on a radio telescope for the Moon’s far side. Bandyopadhyay is an IIT Bombay graduate who co-founded Pratham, the institute’s first student satellite, which reached orbit in 2016, and he later earned his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specializing in swarm guidance for multi-agent space missions.
A.C. Charania — Powering astronauts through the lunar night
Charania’s project, EARENDIL, looks at using radioisotope power to extend astronaut spacewalks into the punishing cold and darkness of the lunar night and other icy, sunless corners of the solar system.
Charania spent time until April 2025 as NASA’s chief technologist, advising the agency’s administrator on technology policy across all six of NASA’s mission directorates. His career has moved through Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit, Blue Origin, and Reliable Robotics before NASA, and he now serves as Senior Vice President of Space Business Development at Zeno Power.
Anish Damodaran Roshi — Sharper eyes on the universe’s coldest light
Damodaran Roshi’s project, PS21, explores using photonic technology to transform submillimeter space interferometry — the kind of instrumentation used to study the faint radio signals given off by star-forming molecular clouds.
A University of Kerala engineering graduate, Damodaran Roshi has spent more than two decades at some of the world’s leading radio observatories, including the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the Arecibo Observatory. He’s credited with developing a technique for estimating magnetic fields inside molecular clouds using carbon radio recombination lines, and he’s now building an experimental astronomy lab at the University of Central Florida to train the next generation of observational astrophysicists.
Broader ideas for the future space travels:
The rest of the 2026 cohort is just as ambitious: coilable solar sails for high-speed missions, a power-over-fiber robot to explore lunar caves, autonomous reconnaissance systems for cave-riddled terrain, and a Venus lander built to survive the planet’s crushing heat and pressure. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory alone leads three of the 18 selected concepts.
None of these ideas are guaranteed to go anywhere — that’s baked into how NIAC works. But the program’s history includes early support for concepts that later shaped real missions, which is exactly why a $175,000, nine-month bet on dimming the sun or tunneling through lunar ice is worth watching.
Quick facts about the 2026 NIAC Phase I awards
- 18 awards, $3.2 million total, up to $175,000 per award for a nine-month study
- Announced by NASA on July 29, 2026
- Three of the 18 awardees are Indian-origin researchers: Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay (JPL), A.C. Charania (Zeno Power Systems), and Anish Damodaran Roshi (University of Central Florida)
- Both Bandyopadhyay and Charania are repeat NIAC fellows
- Bandyopadhyay co-founded IIT Bombay’s first student satellite project, Pratham, launched in 2016
- Charania served as NASA’s chief technologist until April 2025
- Damodaran Roshi previously led the radio astronomy group at the Arecibo Observatory
- NIAC-funded projects are early concept studies, not approved NASA missions
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