NASA Just Unveiled Its Moon Base Plans And The First Missions Launch This Year
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood at the agency's Washington headquarters and unveiled the most detailed Moon Base roadmap the space program has ever publicly released, announcing the first three uncrewed missions, the companies contracted to carry them out, and the full scope of the infrastructure being built to allow astronauts to live and work at the lunar South Pole starting as early as 2028. The first mission, Moon Base I, is targeted for launch no earlier than this fall and will use Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance lander to set down near Shackleton Crater, carrying instruments that measure how rocket exhaust interacts with the lunar surface and a laser array to help orbiting spacecraft pinpoint their exact position. Moon Base II, planned for later this year, will deliver more than 1,100 pounds of cargo on Astrobotic's Griffin lander, including Astrolab's FLIP rover to begin testing the mobility systems that will eventually carry astronauts. Moon Base III will carry instruments from European and South Korean partners to study mysterious bright streaks on the lunar surface known as lunar swirls.
Beyond the three initial missions, NASA awarded approximately $219 million to Astrolab and $220 million to Lunar Outpost to develop crewed lunar terrain vehicles, the rovers that astronauts will drive across the South Pole's permanently shadowed craters and ancient ice-bearing terrain, with those vehicles also carrying cargo and serving as mobile platforms for scientific operations. Firefly Aerospace, which became the first American company to successfully land on the Moon in 2025, was separately selected to transport four autonomous drones to the lunar surface as part of a mission called MoonFall, designed to scout potential landing sites and survey regions too dangerous for astronauts to visit directly. Isaacman said NASA will announce more than a dozen additional missions later this year, each one a building block that generates operational knowledge before humans arrive. He described what is being built not as a temporary outpost but as humanity's first actual home on another world, and said the agency will not slow down on the path to get there.
