Aiming for the lunar station NASA Restructures Moon Programme: Long‑Term Presence Planned

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New NASA chief Jared Isaacman continues to make sweeping changes: first he upended the crewed moon missions, and now there are further plan alterations for the Moon and Mars.

The US space agency NASA is once again fundamentally reorganising its lunar programme: a permanent human presence on the Moon is now being targeted, NASA chief Jared Isaacman said at an event in Washington. “This lunar station will not appear overnight. Over the next seven years we will invest around $20 billion and build it with dozens of missions,” he said.

Plans for a lunar orbital station called “Gateway” would, by contrast, be shelved at least for the time being. The station, in which the European Space Agency (ESA) had also been involved, was intended to serve as a staging post for crewed missions to the Moon and possibly later to Mars.

Isaacman also said NASA plans to send the first nuclear‑powered spacecraft to Mars by 2028. “NASA is committed to achieving again what is almost impossible: returning to the Moon before the end of President Trump’s term, building a lunar base, establishing a sustained presence and doing the other things that ensure American leadership in space,” he said.

Context: a renewed race among space nations

A further motive is the global competition in space. “The clock is ticking in this great‑power contest, and success or failure will be measured in months, not years.” For some time now there has been a new race among spacefaring nations to the Moon. The biggest rival to the US is China, which has set a goal of sending humans to the Moon by 2030. Russia also plans lunar missions but is struggling with delays due to economic problems.

Europe’s former space chief Jan Wörner expressed scepticism about NASA’s plans. “As nice as the partial realisation of the ‘Moon Village’ idea is in principle, it is regrettable and worrying that the international dimension is not being addressed concretely,” the former ESA director told the German Press Agency. “The fact that Gateway is being sacrificed is unfortunate from a European perspective. After all, ESA had committed to deliver parts.”

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Artemis programme already overhauled

A few weeks ago Isaacman already completely revised the troubled Artemis lunar programme. The Artemis 3 mission, which had originally aimed to land a crew on the Moon no earlier than 2028, is now to launch next year but will not perform a landing.

Instead, the Orion capsule on that mission is to dock in space with one or two lunar landers. Those landers are to be developed and built by the private space companies SpaceX, led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. There may even be two Moon landing attempts in 2028 — “Artemis 4” and “Artemis 5”. Landings are planned initially every six months, with the potential for an even tighter cadence, Isaacman said.

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Artemis 2 to launch as soon as possible

Meanwhile, the Artemis 2 mission should proceed as planned and launch as soon as possible. That mission is intended to send humans near the Moon for the first time in more than half a century. US astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman, together with their Canadian colleague Jeremy Hansen, are to fly around the Moon during the roughly ten‑day mission. US astronauts last visited the Moon in 1972.

The launch of Artemis 2 has, however, been delayed by technical problems. The earliest possible launch date is currently 1 April.