{"id":9551,"date":"2026-05-27T21:34:57","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T13:34:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasa-outlines-nearly-1-billion-investment-into-initial-moon-base-missions\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T21:34:57","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T13:34:57","slug":"nasa-outlines-nearly-1-billion-investment-into-initial-moon-base-missions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasa-outlines-nearly-1-billion-investment-into-initial-moon-base-missions\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA outlines nearly $1 billion investment into initial Moon Base missions"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_73484\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-73484\" style=\"width: 678px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-73484\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/20260526_Blue_Moon_CLV-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"678\" height=\"381\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/20260526_Blue_Moon_CLV-1.jpg 678w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/20260526_Blue_Moon_CLV-1-300x169.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 678px) 100vw, 678px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-73484\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">An artist\u2019s rendering of a Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander deploying Astrolab\u2019s Crewed Lunar Vehicle (CLV-1) on the surface of the Moon. Graphic: Astrolab<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>NASA\u2019s vision for a future, long-term sustained presence on the Moon gained more clarity on Tuesday as the agency announced a series of contract awards for future robotic missions.<\/p>\n<p>The agency announced that two companies developing lunar terrain vehicles (LTVs), Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, would each be receiving contracts valued at about $220 million each to finish their designs and get them to the Moon\u2019s surface.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Astrolab\u2019s Crewed Lunar Vehicle (CLV-1) takes after its original design, called FLEX, and Lunar Outpost\u2019s Pegasus vehicle takes heritage from its earlier Eagle design. NASA previously put out a call for LTVs that would be capable of surviving on the Moon for up to 10 years, but revised its requirements to have more readily available options to augment earlier astronaut missions.<\/p>\n<p>Connected to that, NASA also awarded the LTV delivery contract to Blue Origin, using it\u2019s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander in a contract that\u2019s worth $234 million for each LTV delivered.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSince the beginning, Blue Origin has been committed to Lunar Permanence,\u201d wrote Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp in a post on X. \u201cThank you, @NASAadmin, for sharing that vision. We\u2019re ready to make it a reality.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/l_re72vz2iU?si=2lJfhWBCqCOoIGzr\" width=\"678\" height=\"381\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The announcement came during a news conference at NASA\u2019s headquarters in Washington D.C.. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said these and other upcoming missions, scheduled to begin in the back half of 2026, that will lay the early ground work for an enduring presence on the Moon\u2019s South Pole.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs we announced during the Ignition event, we intend to take an iterative approach, sending a demand signal to industry for a lot of landers and rovers and tech demonstrations and all the scientific payloads these missions can accommodate,\u201d Isaacman said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are leveraging the NASA playbook from the 1960s, figuring out what works and what doesn\u2019t in this epic science of survival because the Moon Base is as beautiful as it is hostile.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In these early days of crewed landings during the Artemis era, LTVs will need be deployed at a safe distance from the Human Landing System (HLS) landers being provided by SpaceX and Blue Origin. They will kick up quite a bit of lunar regolith during their landing burns, which could damage an LTV if it\u2019s too close.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cProtecting for [plume surface interaction], we plan to keep the LTVs approximately 2 km away when the landers land,\u201d said Ryan Stephan, NASA\u2019s acting director for cargo landers. He previously served as the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) Technical Deputy based at Glenn Research Center.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey\u2019ll traverse in, be able to pick up the crew, and then do missions up to like 10 km during the crewed period and then uncrewed, like Carlos said, a total of like 400 km throughout the lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Moon Base Program Executive Carlos Garc\u00eda-Gal\u00e1n said NASA envisioned footprint of the Moon Base to be \u201chundreds of square miles with different assets, all building up to the objective of permanent lunar presence on the Moon.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_73485\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-73485\" style=\"width: 678px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-73485\" src=\"http:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/20260526_Firefly-MoonFall-Elytra-Deployment-scaled.png-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"678\" height=\"381\" srcset=\"https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/20260526_Firefly-MoonFall-Elytra-Deployment-scaled.png-copy.jpg 678w, https:\/\/spaceflightnow.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/20260526_Firefly-MoonFall-Elytra-Deployment-scaled.png-copy-300x169.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 678px) 100vw, 678px\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-73485\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">An artist\u2019s rendering of Firefly Aerospace\u2019s Elytra Dark spacecraft deploying NASA\u2019s MoonFall hopper drones on the Moon. Graphic: Firefly Aerospace<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The first piece of the pie, dubbed Phase One, extends from now through 2029 and was the focus of Tuesday\u2019s briefing. In addition to the lander and rover contracts announced, Garc\u00eda-Gal\u00e1n also unveiled Firefly Aerospace as the recipient of a $75 million subcontract awarded by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to deploy a series of lunar drones on the MoonFall mission.<\/p>\n<p>During this technology demonstration, which will take place in 2028, one of Firefly\u2019s Elytra Dark spacecraft will fly to the Moon over the course of 45 days before it enters lunar orbit. It will then de-orbit and deploy the drones about 50 km above the Moon\u2019s South Pole.<\/p>\n<p>These hopper drones are designed to last one lunar day (14 Earth days) and will test out the basic technology as well as performing imaging and scouting for future sites of interest.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHigh-resolution imagery across all mission phases, including the deployment, the landing, and nominal operations of staying in-situ or hopping around,\u201d Garc\u00eda-Gal\u00e1n said. \u201cIt will continue image collect during an extended mission and it will analyze different sites for unprecedented detail and basically allowing us to build our understanding of soil mechanics, the terrain, the lighting conditions in-situ of wherever we want to go.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The MoonFall drones can also have the capability of setting up what Garc\u00eda-Gal\u00e1n called a \u201cMoon Base perimeter\u201d that would go on the corners of areas \u201cwhere we think we have either key scientific objectives or we want to build up the Moon Base.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Asked whether such a perimeter would act as a keep-out zone for nations not party to the Artemis Accords, an agreement for Deep Space best practices and understanding, Isaacman said it lent to the importance of reaching the Moon first before nations that the U.S. sees as adversaries, like China.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think the idea that there are areas of great interest on the lunar surface, we do want to get there and explore them and we also obviously want to be very mindful of the Outer Space Treaty, so that we are respectful of other nations that are putting assets on the lunar surface and we would expect that to be reciprocal,\u201d Isaacman said.<\/p>\n<p>Three missions that were formerly part of the original CLPS program were redesigned as Moon Base Missions 1-3:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Blue Origin\u2019s Blue Moon Mk.1 \u2013 Fall 2026<\/li>\n<li>Astrobotic\u2019s Griffin-1 \u2013 late 2026<\/li>\n<li>Intuitive Machines\u2019 IM-3 \u2013 late 2026<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An artist\u2019s rendering of a Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander deploying Astrolab\u2019s Crewed Lunar Vehicle (CLV-1) on the surface of the Moon. Graphic: Astrolab NASA\u2019s vision for a future, long-term sustained presence on the Moon gained more clarity on Tuesday as the agency announced a series of contract awards for future robotic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[698,509,443,503,734,700,190],"class_list":["post-9551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-astrolab","tag-blue-origin","tag-firefly-aerospace","tag-intuitive-machines","tag-lunar-outpost","tag-moon-base","tag-nasa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9551"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}