NASA Unveils $20 Billion Lunar South Pole Base Plan, Cancels Gateway Station

On Tuesday, March 24, at a daylong event at NASA headquarters in Washington, Administrator Jared Isaacman laid out something the agency had long promised but never detailed: a plan to build a base near the moon's south pole where American astronauts could one day live and work permanently. "The moon base will not appear overnight," he told the audience.

The price tag is about $20 billion, to be spent over the next seven years and spread across dozens of missions. Isaacman said NASA will work with commercial and international partners on what he called a deliberate and achievable plan. The agency intends to lean on its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, under which NASA contracts privately managed lunar missions.

The money and hardware have to come from somewhere, and NASA says they will come from Gateway. The planned space station in lunar orbit is being canceled, and international partners' work on it is paused, Isaacman said. Gateway was designed as a research platform and as a transfer point where astronauts would board landers for the trip down to the surface, according to Reuters. Its components and resources will now go toward the surface base.

The roadmap has three phases. The first expands the number of lunar missions over the next few years, sending rovers and other technology to test mobility, communications and nuclear power generation on the surface. The second uses rocket launches to deliver what NASA calls semi-habitable infrastructure, along with transportation such as rovers, to support recurring astronaut operations. Only in the third phase, with heavier infrastructure delivered, would NASA have the ability to support a long-duration human presence.

The cadence of landings is meant to climb sharply. NASA and its commercial partners have put three robotic vehicles on the moon since 2024, and at least four more missions are planned for 2026. In 2027, the agency plans to raise the count dramatically, with up to 30 uncrewed landings carrying cargo and science instruments. After the Artemis 5 mission, NASA aims to fly crewed surface missions at least every six months, with the potential to go faster as capabilities mature.

The overhaul is the latest reshaping of the lunar program under Isaacman, who took over in December as an appointee of President Donald Trump. A human landing is now targeted for no earlier than 2028, under Artemis 4. At the end of February, NASA announced that date alongside a new Artemis 3 mission planned for 2027, in which a crew would fly an Orion capsule to Earth orbit and dock with at least one lander being developed by Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Isaacman framed the stakes in terms of competition with China. NASA, he said in a statement, is committed to returning to the moon before the end of Trump's term, building a base and establishing an enduring presence. "The clock is running in this great-power competition," he said, "and success or failure will be measured in months, not years."

Artemis, established during Trump's first term, aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo era ended in 1972. NASA's longer-term goal is a south pole base that supports exploration and, eventually, the first human expeditions to Mars.

The nearest test comes first. Artemis 2, the program's first crewed flight, is slated for as early as April 1, carrying three Americans and one Canadian on a 10-day trip around the moon. It will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the 322-foot Space Launch System rocket. After that, the thing to watch is whether the surge of uncrewed landings in 2027 actually happens.