NASA Cancels Lunar Gateway Station, Pivots to $20 Billion Moon Surface Base and Nuclear Mars Mission

On Tuesday, in front of foreign delegates, company executives and members of Congress gathered for a day-long event at NASA headquarters in Washington, agency chief Jared Isaacman announced that NASA has canceled its planned space station in lunar orbit. Components from that project, known as Lunar Gateway, will instead be used to build a $20 billion base on the moon's surface.

Isaacman, a Trump appointee who took charge of NASA in December, described an unprecedented set of changes to the Artemis moon program. The aim is to return Americans to the moon before China lands its own astronauts there, a goal Beijing has set for around 2030. The surface base plan includes sending more robotic landers, deploying a fleet of drones, and laying groundwork over the next few years for using nuclear power on the lunar surface.

Isaacman framed the shift as a return to method. He said the revised step-by-step approach, meant to build muscle memory, reduce risk and build confidence, is how NASA achieved the near impossible in the 1960s during Apollo. He also said no one should be surprised that Gateway is being paused in its current form, as the agency focuses on infrastructure for sustained operations on the surface. Despite what he called very real hardware and schedule challenges, he said, equipment and international partner commitments can be repurposed for surface and other program goals.

That last point leaves open the roles of three key partners. Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency had each agreed to provide components for the orbital station, and turning that hardware into a surface base is a difficult undertaking. European Space Agency chief Josef Aschbacher, who attended the event, told Reuters he will study the new plans and keep talking with NASA about them.

Gateway had been designed as both a research platform and a transfer point where astronauts would board moon landers for the descent. NASA's current plans still call for putting astronauts on the surface in 2028.

The agency also disclosed a mission to Mars. A spacecraft called Space Reactor 1 Freedom is to launch before the end of 2028 to demonstrate advanced nuclear electric propulsion in deep space, which NASA called a major step in moving nuclear power and propulsion from the laboratory into space. Once it reaches Mars, the spacecraft is to deploy helicopters to explore the planet.

The changes Isaacman has made to the flagship program in recent weeks are reshaping billions of dollars in Artemis contracts, and companies are scrambling to keep pace with the added urgency.

The lander programs are central to that effort. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, and Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, are both developing astronaut moon landers for NASA, and each is targeting an initial crewed landing in 2028. Both have fallen behind schedule. NASA's inspector general said this month that SpaceX, chosen in 2021 for the first astronaut lander, is two years behind, and that both companies face a list of complex engineering challenges before they can fly people.

Isaacman and other senior officials said little on Tuesday about how the companies would speed up. But acting associate administrator Lori Glaze suggested the companies want to dock with the Orion astronaut capsule in a different orbit between Earth and the moon than originally planned, before ferrying crews down. She said SpaceX has been considering alternatives to its current Starship design while pursuing a more streamlined approach to speed things up. Glaze also said NASA will now use whichever lander is ready first, rather than following a predetermined order of mission assignments.

The Artemis program began in 2017, during Trump's first term, and envisions regular lunar missions as the follow-up to Apollo, which ended in 1972. What to watch next: what Japan, Canada and Europe end up contributing, whether either lander meets 2028, and whether the nuclear spacecraft launches on time.