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NASA remains committed to developing a permanent presence on the Moon — space science budgets be damned.
During a Tuesday event, the space agency announced a slew of new contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for Moon base infrastructure including lunar rovers, as well as timeframes for upcoming development and exploration missions.
Before the end of this year, NASA wants to send two of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar landers to the Moon’s surface to deliver two lunar terrain vehicles being developed by commercial partners Astrolab and Lunar Outpost.
Meanwhile, Firefly Aerospace, whose Blue Ghost lander successfully touched down on the Moon in March 2025, will develop drones to explore the rugged surface.
And that’s just the buildup to NASA’s Artemis 4 mission, the first planned crewed landing in over half a century, which is tentatively slated for 2028. Artemis 3, which was originally envisioned as a landing attempt, will now involve the testing of either or both Blue Origin’s lander and SpaceX’s Starship in low-Earth orbit sometime next year.
To call NASA’s plans for its Moon base ambitious would be a staggering understatement. For one, Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander has yet to successfully deliver a payload into Earth’s orbit following a failed attempt last month. Getting to the Moon, softly landing, and releasing a robotic lander will likely prove far more difficult.
The agency laid out plans for three “Moon Base missions,” starting with a Blue Moon delivery of scientific instruments in “fall 2026,” followed by a delivery of “more than 1,100 pounds of cargo on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander,” including a rover.
The third mission, which is “also targeted for this year,” will deliver even more scientific payloads, including ones being developed by the European Space Agency and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute.
“These missions are the first of more than a dozen missions that will be announced this year, each designed to generate operational data and reduce risk ahead of crewed Artemis surface activities,” the agency wrote in its writeup of Tuesday’s event.
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