NASA to Update Public on $20 Billion Lunar South Pole Moon Base Plans as Artemis Advances

At 2 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, May 26, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and two other agency officials are scheduled to step up at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., to tell reporters how far the plan for a lunar base has come. The briefing will be streamed free on NASA+ and on the agency's YouTube channel.

The project is a $20 billion moon base, to be built near the lunar south pole. That puts it farther south on the moon's surface than any Apollo astronaut ever traveled, in a region that remains largely unexplored. According to NASA's news release, the officials will describe progress toward what the agency calls a sustained presence on the lunar surface.

The base is still a few years from taking shape. For now, the work is about figuring out how such an unprecedented undertaking could actually be done. NASA first laid out specifics about the base in March, and Tuesday's briefing is the follow-up, an account of how that work has moved since.

The plan calls for assembling the base across both uncrewed and crewed missions, which would deliver vehicles, equipment and infrastructure to the surface. Once finished, it would serve as a place where astronauts can live and work for long stretches. NASA has described two aims: studying the moon itself, and learning how best to send the first humans to Mars.

The base is one of the main objectives of the Artemis campaign, which aims to put astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo era ended in 1972. The moon is regarded as a nearly unaltered record of billions of years, valuable to study in its own right and as a stepping stone deeper into space. A central question for Artemis is how humans can survive and thrive there before heading to Mars.

The briefing comes as the campaign is in motion. In April, four astronauts flew around the moon and back on Artemis II, without landing. The mission was a critical test of the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion crew capsule that anchor the program.

Next is Artemis III, a potential 2027 launch in which four more astronauts will travel in Earth orbit. That flight is meant to test one or both of the commercial lunar landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin. Together, the two test missions are meant to set up the first of many planned crewed landings, which could begin as early as 2028 with Artemis IV.

What to watch on Tuesday is how much detail the officials offer about the base's progress, and how it fits with the 2027 and 2028 milestones that would have to come first.