NASA Scraps Lunar Space Station, Shifts $20 Billion Focus to Moon Base

NASA is cancelling plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and will instead construct a $20 billion base on the Moon's surface over the next seven years, administrator Jared Isaacman announced Tuesday at the opening of a day-long event at NASA's Washington headquarters.

"It should not really surprise anyone that we are pausing Gateway in its current form and focusing on infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the lunar surface," Isaacman told delegates at the event. Isaacman said NASA plans to construct the lunar base over dozens of missions, "working together with commercial and international partners towards a deliberate and achievable plan."

The Lunar Gateway station, largely already built by contractors Northrop Grumman and Vantor, formerly Maxar, was meant to be a space station parked in lunar orbit. Repurposing the craft for a lunar surface base is not simple. "Despite some of the very real hardware and schedule challenges, we can repurpose equipment and international partner commitments to support surface and other program objectives," Isaacman said.

The Gateway orbital station was meant to serve both as a point of transfer for astronauts headed to the Moon as well as a platform for research. Its suspension is not entirely surprising: some had criticized it as wasteful or a distraction from other lunar ambitions. Any shift from the Gateway to a lunar base will require approval from Congress. A budget reconciliation bill passed last July provided $2.6 billion for the Gateway, with that project defined in law as an "outpost in orbit around the Moon." Isaacman did not rule out restarting the Gateway at some point, saying the shift "does not preclude revisiting the orbital outpost in the future."

NASA's new plan unfolds across three phases. Phase 1, running from 2026 to 2028, "is all about getting to the Moon reliably," including a significant increase in the cadence of lander missions through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and developing enabling technologies and ground truth for potential base locations at the lunar south pole. Phase 2, from 2029 through 2031, starts building the base itself, including communications, navigation, power and other infrastructure, larger CLPS cargo landers, and supporting two crewed missions a year. Phase 3, beginning in 2032, will enable "long distance and long duration human exploration" on the Moon, with routine logistics missions and uncrewed cargo return missions. NASA foresees spending $10 billion each on phases 1 and 2, with phase 3 costing an additional $10 billion or more through at least 2036.

Isaacman struck an expansive tone about the ambition behind the pivot: "There will be an evolutionary path to building humanity's first permanent surface outpost beyond Earth, and we will take the world along with us."

He added that "the surface will be the technology proving ground for the capabilities required to undertake future missions to Mars, not to mention that it is safer and enables incredible opportunities for science."

The European Space Agency, among other international organizations, was a partner on the planned Gateway project. The suspension of the project, which would have resulted in the construction of the first space station outside of Earth orbit, may come as a surprise to NASA's international partners. NASA said it will repurpose applicable Gateway hardware and leverage existing international partner commitments toward surface objectives.

Despite scrapping its planned lunar-orbiting station, NASA still aims for a 2027 Artemis III launch. Beginning with Artemis III, the agency intends to establish a once-a-year Moon landing cadence, with Artemis IV scheduled for 2028, advancing to once every six months following Artemis V, "with the potential to increase cadence as capabilities mature."

Those strategic revisions came amid repeated delays to the Artemis 2 mission, which was originally due to take off as early as February but is now targeting early April. It is meant to see the first flyby of the Moon in more than half a century.

NASA has committed to landing astronauts back on the Moon "before the end of President Trump's term," Isaacman stated. The changes Isaacman has imposed on the Artemis program in recent weeks are reshaping billions of dollars worth of contracts, sending companies scrambling to accommodate the extra urgency as China makes progress toward its own 2030 Moon landing.