NASA plans to invest $20 billion over the next seven years to develop a base on the surface of the Moon, marking a significant strategic shift aimed at enabling humans to live there permanently. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and other agency officials outlined the framework of the plan on Tuesday in Washington during a meeting with partners and contractors involved in the Artemis program, the agency's lunar initiative. In addition to plans for the lunar base, NASA also announced it will develop a completely new spacecraft to reach Mars.
Both projects aim to fulfill an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in December, which called for the United States to return astronauts to the Moon by 2028 and begin constructing a permanent outpost there by 2030. "Taxpayers support NASA because we can change the world in air, space, and science, and inspire the next generation along the way," Isaacman said. "We cannot scatter ourselves, trying to undertake dozens of distractions imposed from outside and by ourselves, jumping straight to the dream state at the cost of an achievable strategy.
" The announcement comes about a week before NASA seeks to launch humans to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years, as part of a mission called Artemis II. The upcoming mission, which will send a crew of four to orbit the Moon, will help set the stage for a crewed landing in the coming years. Pause on Gateway As part of this new strategy, the U.
S. space agency is reconsidering a long-standing plan to build a space station in orbit around the Moon. For years, the U.
S. space agency has been developing Gateway, a space station that would live in lunar orbit. Gateway was intended as a…
But now the agency intends to reuse some elements of Gateway so they can exist on the lunar surface. This could affect one of Gateway's habitation modules being built by Northrop Grumman Corp. , called HALO, as well as another module named I-Hab, which is being developed by the European Space Agency.
"It should be no surprise that we are pausing Gateway in its current form and focusing on infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the lunar surface," Isaacman said. "Despite some very real challenges related to hardware and timelines, we can reuse equipment and commitments from international partners to support surface goals and others from the program. " Isaacman also stated that NASA will develop a completely new spacecraft called Space Reactor-1 Freedom, a nuclear propulsion structure that the agency intends to send to Mars in 2028.
SR-1 Freedom will be tasked with deploying helicopters on the Red Planet, similar to the Ingenuity helicopter that NASA flew alongside its Perseverance rover. Carlos Garcia-Galan, executive of NASA's Moon Base program, detailed the plans for the new lunar outpost at the conference, which will be built in three main phases and incorporate components and partnerships from the already discarded Gateway station. The first phase, starting this Tuesday, involves learning to reach the Moon more frequently using robotic landing modules and experimenting with new infrastructure technologies, including new satellite networks to enable better communication on the lunar surface.
The next two phases will involve developing a fleet of landing modules, rovers, drones, power generators, and other critical hardware over the next decade to create a permanent and operational base. "America will never give up on the Moon" NASA's Artemis program has faced significant criticism for its high costs and delays in development. A report from NASA's inspector general estimated that the entire Artemis effort has cost $93 billion through 2025, with hardware often failing to meet projected timelines.
NASA plans to spend $30 billion on the lunar base program over the next decade, according to Garcia-Galan. To do this, the agency would need ongoing funding from Congress at a time when government discretionary spending is under scrutiny and the budget deficit is projected to exceed $3 trillion by 2036. The agency indicated that it plans to increase the frequency of lunar landings in the coming years.
On Tuesday, the space agency published a request for information to the industry to help transition from "government-driven missions" to a "commercially sustainable lunar transportation ecosystem," starting with Artemis VI and subsequent missions. Isaacman noted that the goal is to work with at least two companies to launch crewed missions to the Moon once every six months in the future. "America will never give up on the Moon," Isaacman said.
The U. S. space authority also faces an extremely tight deadline to send humans to the Moon in just two and a half years with the contractors it already has.
The agency has chosen SpaceX and Blue Origin LLC, founded by Jeff Bezos, to develop lunar landing modules capable of safely transporting astronauts. However, both companies must overcome significant engineering hurdles, and a recent report from NASA's inspector general indicated that further delays are likely for SpaceX's Starship rocket, which the company is developing as a lunar landing module. Isaacman's announcement on Tuesday came after a major restructuring of the Artemis mission last month.
As part of that redesign, NASA plans to conduct an additional test mission in 2027, which will send a crew to dock with one or two of the lunar landing modules in low Earth orbit as practice before the planned Moon landing in 2028.