NASA Unveils $20 Billion Plan to Build Permanent Moon Base Near South Pole

This time, the goal is to stay." With those seven words at the Ignition event in Washington, D.C., NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a $20 billion, seven-year program to construct a permanent base near the lunar south pole, the most detailed moon settlement roadmap the agency has ever publicly released.

"The moon base will not appear overnight," Isaacman said. "We will invest approximately $20 billion over the next seven years and build it through dozens of missions, working together with commercial and international partners towards a deliberate and achievable plan."

The announcement arrived just over a week before the planned launch of Artemis II, NASA's around-the-moon mission, and outlined a three-phase architecture intended to move the agency from isolated lunar visits to continuous human settlement. Phase one centers on deploying robots, instruments, and the Lunar Land Vehicle through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program to test power generation and communications on the surface. Phase two introduces semi-habitable infrastructure, including a pressurized rover from Japan's JAXA that would allow astronauts to travel long distances without wearing spacesuits at all times. Phase three constructs full habitats supported by large, scalable systems: nuclear and solar power, crewed and uncrewed rovers, a cellphone-like lunar communications network, a lunar GPS system, and constellations of observation and relay satellites.

The plan also formalized a significant programmatic shift. Isaacman said NASA is shelving the Lunar Gateway, the proposed orbital space station, in its current form. "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," he said, adding flatly: "America will never again give up the moon."

Based on results from Artemis II and the subsequent Artemis III mission, NASA now plans to attempt at least one and possibly two crewed moon landings in 2028, designated Artemis IV and Artemis V, using privately developed landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin. Isaacman also added a new low-Earth orbit test flight, planned for next year, to verify rendezvous and docking procedures using Orion crew ships alongside those commercial landers before any lunar descent is attempted.

How the $20 billion figure will be financed remains an open question. It was not immediately clear how much NASA could redirect from existing programs versus how much would require new congressional appropriation. The agency also announced at the same event a separate nuclear-powered Mars vehicle with a targeted 2028 launch, a timeline that analysts have already flagged as extraordinarily compressed even by the standards of deep-space exploration.

Isaacman framed the entire agenda in expansive terms at the close of his remarks. "If we concentrate NASA's extraordinary resources on the objectives of the National Space Policy, clear away needless obstacles that impede progress, and unleash the workforce and industrial might of our nation and partners," he said, "then returning to the moon and building a base will seem pale in comparison to what we will be capable of accomplishing in the years ahead."

Tuesday marked the first time NASA publicly released a formal timeline and road map for a moon base. Whether Congress funds it at the scale Isaacman described will determine whether that road map becomes a construction schedule or remains an aspiration.