NASA shifts to lunar base

NASA is pausing Gateway, the small station planned for lunar orbit, and shifting Artemis toward building a base on the Moon’s south pole instead. (nasa.gov) NASA announced the change on March 24 at its “Ignition” event in Washington, where Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency would “build a Moon base” and return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028. NASA’s release said the new plan uses a “focused, phased architecture” built “landing by landing.” (nasa.gov) In NASA’s new roadmap, Phase 1 runs now through 2029 and calls for up to 25 missions, including 21 landings, with four tons of payload delivered to test power, communications, rovers and other surface systems. Phase 2, from 2029 to 2032, adds habitation hardware and up to 60 tons of cargo across as many as 24 landings. (nasa.gov) Phase 3 starts in 2032 and aims for routine crew rotations, semi-permanent habitats, pressurized rovers and a fission power station that can keep the outpost running through the two-week lunar night. NASA’s user guide says the end state is “a continuous human presence on the lunar surface.” (nasa.gov) Gateway was designed as a waystation in a looping orbit around the Moon, where crews could dock, live briefly and transfer to landers. NASA’s Gateway page still describes it as a “multi-purpose outpost” and says its first elements are planned for launch no earlier than 2027, underscoring how recent the policy turn is. (nasa.gov) The shift changes the order of work more than the end goal. NASA had long tied Artemis to “a long-term presence at the Moon,” but the new plan moves money, hardware and management attention toward habitats, cargo delivery, power and communications on the surface first. (nasa.gov; nasa.gov) The move also lands in the middle of active international commitments built around Gateway. Canada is building Canadarm3 for the station, while Japan and Europe have been assigned life-support, cargo and habitation roles tied to Gateway modules and logistics. (canada.ca; humans-in-space.jaxa.jp; esa.int) NASA has not said in the March 24 release how those partner contributions will be re-scoped, and its public Gateway pages still reflect the earlier architecture. Flight Plan, which first framed the change as a pause of Gateway “in its current form,” reported that the new emphasis is on surface infrastructure rather than orbital staging. (nasa.gov; flightplan.forecastinternational.com) The announcement came just a week before Artemis II lifted off on April 1, sending four astronauts around the Moon on NASA’s first crewed lunar mission since Apollo. That keeps the near-term flight plan intact even as the agency rewrites what comes after the first return to the surface. (nasa.gov; nasa.gov)