By Mike Wall last updated yesterday (Space.com)
“Leadership will discuss program progress, including new industry partners and mission plans.”
Update for 5:45 p.m. EDT: NASA’s moon base update today unveiled a series of new contract awards by NASA for two commercial lunar rovers, built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, as well as awards to Blue Origin to land the rovers on the moon with its Blue Moon lander, and an award to Firefly Aerospace to deliver up to four hopping MoonFall drones to the lunar surface in the next few years. Read our full story. See a full replay below.
NASA will give an update this afternoon (May 26) about its plans to build a moon base, and you can watch it live.
The U.S. space agency will host a press conference Tuesday at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. “to share Moon Base plans and highlight progress toward a sustained presence on the lunar surface,” NASA officials wrote in a media advisory on May 20.You may like
- NASA announcing update to Artemis moon plans today: Watch it live
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- Artemis 3 and beyond: What’s next for NASA after Artemis 2 moon success
You can watch the event here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA.
During the event, NASA leaders “will discuss program progress, including new industry partners and mission plans,” agency officials added in the advisory.
Those leaders are:
- NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
- Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator, Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate
- Carlos García-Galán, program executive, Moon Base
The moon base is a core part of NASA’s Artemis program of crewed lunar exploration. Artemis aims to establish a permanent human presence on and around the moon over the next decade or so, developing knowledge and skills that can help get astronauts to Mars in the not-too-distant future.
Two Artemis missions have launched to date: the uncrewed Artemis 1 flight to lunar orbit in late 2022 and Artemis 2, which sent four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth last month.
We got a big update about NASA’s moon strategy in late March, just a week before Artemis 2 lifted off. In that news drop, the agency revealed that it’s pausing work on Gateway, a small space station planned for lunar orbit that was long a key piece of Artemis’ architecture, to focus on the surface base.
And there was another big change in late February: Isaacman announced that the Artemis 3 mission, which is slated to launch in mid to late 2027, will no longer land astronauts on the moon. Instead, it will test docking operations between the Orion crew capsule and one or both of Artemis’ privately developed lunar landers (SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon) in Earth orbit.
The first crewed lunar landing since the Apollo days will now take place on Artemis 4, which NASA wants to launch in late 2028. That will help lay the foundation for the moon base, which will be built near the south pole between 2032 and 2036, if all goes to plan.
Spaceflight and Tech Editor
Michael Wall is the Spaceflight and Tech Editor for Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers human and robotic spaceflight, military space, and exoplanets, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.