Jared Isaacman, the administrator of the World’s largest space program, NASA, has come out to reveal that the agency intends to construct a base on the moon.
This revelation is coming months after the Artemis II mission completed an expedition around the moon.
The administrator noted that NASA would have monthly robotic landings in 2027, and by the early 2030s, astronauts may be able to spend months at a time on the lunar surface.
“We are moving with the confidence and the purpose to accomplish the missions that only NASA is capable of achieving,” said Isaacman in introductory remarks for the official “Moon Base” proceedings, a follow-up to an announcement in March that revealed NASA’s overarching lunar exploration plans. “And we are really just getting started.”
By the time Artemis 4 astronauts land in 2028, “they’re going to already have some infrastructure of the moon base waiting for them,” Isaacman said Wednesday in a Bloomberg Television interview.
NASA has secured the services of Blue Origin and various other contractors to facilitate the delivery of landers and rovers.
This initiative constitutes a critical component of a three-phase strategic framework designed to establish the necessary infrastructure for future crewed missions.
Overall, as seen on YahooFinance, the announcements were a kind of lunar coming-out party for Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin, whose Mark 1 lunar cargo lander will transport technology experiments and scientific equipment to the south pole of the moon.
Future Artemis astronaut landings are planned to take place in this isolated lunar area, along with the much-discussed moon base. In addition to the Mark 1 for cargo missions, Blue Origin is offering the Mark 2 lander, a crewed spacecraft, as a means of transporting humans to the moon’s surface for the 2028 Artemis IV mission.
Two commercial aerospace firms, Astrolab of Hawthorne, California, and Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colorado, were given contracts worth more than $200 million each by NASA officials on Tuesday to construct and deploy the first lunar terrain vehicles (LTVs) capable of carrying astronauts.
These solar-powered cars have a 200-kilometer range, a top speed of 10 km/h, and the ability to navigate on their own.
According to NASA’s Robert Pickle, who oversees the LTV program, if all goes according to plan, one or both firms should have their vehicles on the moon before the Artemis IV and Artemis V landings in order to assist in scouting the surrounding area both before and after each mission. Pickle said, “We hope to fly both of them to the moon.”
