NASA Lays Out Moon Base Plan: New Rover Contracts, Cargo Landers and First Three Missions

On Tuesday at NASA headquarters in Washington, agency leaders put dates, vendors and dollar figures behind a plan they are calling the Moon Base: a set of robotic and crewed-support missions to the lunar South Pole meant to pave the way for Artemis astronaut landings.

Administrator Jared Isaacman described the Moon Base as America's and humanity's first outpost on another celestial world. He said every mission, crewed or uncrewed, would be a chance to learn how to return to the surface, build the infrastructure to stay and master living in one of the most demanding environments imaginable. He thanked President Donald Trump, Congress, industry, international partners and NASA employees for the resources to achieve the near-impossible. Last week, in an exclusive interview with the National News Desk's Kayla Gaskins, he said NASA is moving aggressively on a revamped Artemis roadmap meant to avoid the delays and technical setbacks that dogged earlier missions.

NASA named the first three Moon Base missions. Moon Base I, targeted for launch no earlier than fall 2026, will use Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance lander. It will carry the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies instrument, which examines how thrusters interact with the lunar surface, and the Laser Retroreflective Array, which lets orbiting spacecraft fix their position more precisely using reflected laser light. It is to land on the Shackleton Connecting Ridge to demonstrate capabilities that reduce risk for crewed Artemis landings in 2028.

Moon Base II, planned for later this year, will deliver more than 1,100 pounds of cargo aboard Astrobotic's Griffin lander. Among it is Astrolab's FLIP rover, intended to mature mobility systems that will inform future operations of the lunar terrain vehicle, or LTV. Moon Base III, also targeted for this year, will fly the first payload selected through NASA's Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon initiative. Its anchor investigation, Lunar Vertex, will ride on Intuitive Machines' Nova-C Trinity lander to study lunar swirls, the light patches on the surface, to better understand surface evolution and how materials behave under extreme conditions. The mission will also carry payloads from the European Space Agency and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute. NASA said these three are the first of more than a dozen missions to be announced this year.

The rover contracts carry the largest figures. NASA awarded Astrolab $219 million and Lunar Outpost $220 million for the first phase of LTVs, together about $439 million. The awards are firm-fixed-price, performance-based milestones under the Phase 1 High Achievability Mission task orders of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract, and they aim to put crewed and uncrewed mobility systems on the surface by 2028 through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.

Astrolab's Crewed Lunar Vehicle, CLV1, is adapted from the company's FLEX architecture. It is designed to carry astronauts and supplies and support remote operations, with a compact stowed configuration, a mass of about 2,000 pounds and a speed above 6 mph on level ground. Lunar Outpost's Pegasus is a lighter, mission-ready evolution of its Eagle rover, built to meet NASA's updated LTV requirements. It can operate for up to a year, can be driven manually, autonomously or by teleoperation, and can exceed 9 mph. NASA says it draws on Apollo-heritage technology. Over the next 18 months, both companies are to finalize designs, run crewed evaluations and qualify flight units, and NASA says it will open the field to more vendors through onramp competitions.

To get the rovers there, NASA awarded Blue Origin a $188 million contract, with an option period worth $280.4 million, covering two task orders.

NASA also updated its MoonFall mission, which will send four drones flying across the lunar surface to survey potential Artemis landing sites. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California is designing and testing prototype hardware, and Firefly Aerospace has been selected to build the spacecraft that carries the drones from Earth orbit to the Moon. Launch is targeted for 2028. The drones will gather data and high-resolution imagery of difficult terrain, and after each drone's final flight, its payload is expected to keep operating for several months.

The near-term markers are the Moon Base I launch this fall at the earliest, the two further landings planned this year, the rover design work due within 18 months, and the 2028 crewed landing target.