NASA shares its ‘moon base’ plan as the Artemis program aims for a sustained human presence on the lunar surface

NASA officials on Tuesday detailed the space agency’s plans to establish a lunar base, where astronauts could live and work long-term with the ultimate goal of studying the moon and its origins, as well as how best to send the first humans to Mars.

“America is returning to the moon,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a news conference from the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. He said that while NASA will be “leveraging” its playbook from the first human moon landing in 1969, this time the goal is to stay.

The $20 billion project would be assembled in three different phases that would include uncrewed and crewed missions to the moon to deliver equipment, vehicles and infrastructure, Isaacman said.

Building a permanent moon base is central to NASA’s Artemis program, which included last month’s historic spaceflight around the moon. NASA said that under Artemis, astronauts will be sent on “increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.”

What is ‘moon base’?

The space agency describes the base as “a long-term lunar exploration and infrastructure initiative designed to enable sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity at the lunar South Pole.”

NASA is envisioning the size of the moon base to be hundreds of square miles, comparable to a large city, like New York or Los Angeles.

What is the purpose of moon base?

“There’s knowledge to be had, technology to built that will help with life here on Earth. There’s certainly going to be inspiration for the next generation. … There’s a lot of great things that will come from having an outpost on the moon,” Isaacman said.

“Number one, we want to be in an environment where we can learn the skills so that astronauts can go and plant the stars and stripes on Mars someday.”

Why would moon base be established near the lunar south pole?

The region remains largely unexplored, and it’s farther south than any Apollo astronaut has ever traveled on the moon. But NASA says its unique environmental conditions are favorable for human exploration, in part due to the longer periods of sunlight and shorter periods of darkness that occur there when compared with other regions.

“These lighting conditions can support more consistent solar power generation and improved thermal stability for exploration systems and surface operations,” NASA’s website says.

The South Pole is also located near regions that remain in continuous darkness, where the extremely cold environments may have preserved water ice or other substances.

“Studying samples from these deposits could help scientists better understand the history of the moon, Earth, and the processes that shaped conditions for life,” NASA says. “The identification and analysis of these volatiles may also help support a more sustained human presence on the moon by informing how local resources could one day be utilized for exploration activities.”

What are the phases of moon base?

In order for NASA to achieve its objective of establishing a permanent lunar presence, its plan needs to be broken up into phases, moon base program executive Carlos García-Galán explained Tuesday.

“Phase 1 has already started. From now through 2029, we’re going to make sure that getting to the lunar surface is a high reliability endeavor,” García-Galán said. “Many assets can deliver that. We're also going to test an experiment [in] the science of survival.”

In phase 2, NASA will build a permanent infrastructure to establish the sustainability of the moon base. Carlos said NASA hopes to have some sort of habitation by then. And in phase 3, which is expected to occur in the year 2032 and beyond, the goal is to achieve permanent habitation.

When will astronauts next land on the moon?

In April, the Artemis II mission successfully transported four astronauts on a historic trip around the moon, during which they set a new record for the farthest distance a human has ever traveled from Earth. The 10-day mission was a critical test of the Space Launch System rocker and the Orion crew capsule, which are the backbone of future Artemis missions.

Up next is the Artemis III mission, currently slated for mid-2027. It was originally supposed to be a crewed mission to the lunar surface, but now it’ll involve four astronauts who will travel to Earth’s orbit to test lunar landers that are being developed by Blue Origin. Isaacman said NASA is prepping for the Artemis III crew announcement soon.

That test mission will precede Artemis IV, the first of many planned human moon landings expected to start in 2028.