NASA remains committed to developing a permanent presence on the Moon — space science budgets be damned.
During a Tuesday event, the space agency announced a slew of new contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for Moon base infrastructure including lunar rovers, as well as timeframes for upcoming development and exploration missions.
Before the end of this year, NASA wants to send two of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar landers to the Moon’s surface to deliver two lunar terrain vehicles being developed by commercial partners Astrolab and Lunar Outpost.
Meanwhile, Firefly Aerospace, whose Blue Ghost lander successfully touched down on the Moon in March 2025, will develop drones to explore the rugged surface.
And that’s just the buildup to NASA’s Artemis 4 mission, the first planned crewed landing in over half a century, which is tentatively slated for 2028. Artemis 3, which was originally envisioned as a landing attempt, will now involve the testing of either or both Blue Origin’s lander and SpaceX’s Starship in low-Earth orbit sometime next year.
To call NASA’s plans for its Moon base ambitious would be a staggering understatement. For one, Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander has yet to successfully deliver a payload into Earth’s orbit following a failed attempt last month. Getting to the Moon, softly landing, and releasing a robotic lander will likely prove far more difficult.
The agency laid out plans for three “Moon Base missions,” starting with a Blue Moon delivery of scientific instruments in “fall 2026,” followed by a delivery of “more than 1,100 pounds of cargo on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander,” including a rover.
The third mission, which is “also targeted for this year,” will deliver even more scientific payloads, including ones being developed by the European Space Agency and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute.
“These missions are the first of more than a dozen missions that will be announced this year, each designed to generate operational data and reduce risk ahead of crewed Artemis surface activities,” the agency wrote in its writeup of Tuesday’s event.
The base itself will span hundreds of square miles, according to Moon base program executive Carlos Garcia-Galan. Drones, called MoonFall, will mark the perimeter of said base in what could inevitably be a highly contentious marking of territory.
MoonFall, an initiative led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, aims to land near the lunar South Pole by 2028. High-definition optical cameras attached to drones measuring roughly seven feet across and four feet tall will take detailed imagery of the base’s envisioned terrain far ahead of any crewed landings.
In a note, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman vowed that the US would “never give up on the Moon again” by building out its Artemis program.
“We are going back to the Moon, building the base, and doing the other things,” he wrote, referencing John F. Kennedy’s iconic 1962 speech about going to the Moon. “This is no longer something to read in the history books, you are making history.”
However, given the vast degree of complexity involved, successfully launching not just one but a whole slew of missions on the surface of the Moon before the end of 2026 could soon get a massive reality check. In other words, we wouldn’t be shocked to hear from even more delays as Isaacman’s NASA dials up the pressure to build out a permanent presence on the Moon.
If deadlines were to slip — which, given historical precedent, is far from out of the question — the US could be beaten to the punch by the end of this decade after all, as experts continue to warn.
“It would not surprise me at all if China gets there first,” Open University lunar scientist Simeon Barber told the BBC.
More on the Moon base: NASA Announces Gigantic Armada of Moon Launches to “Build President Trump’s Moon Base,” Starting Next Year
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