NASA outlines vision for lunar ‘city’ amid renewed moon race

Washington: NASA’s vision for returning humans to the Moon no longer resembles the brief Apollo-era visits of flags, footprints and hurried science experiments.

Instead, the US space agency now talks openly about building something closer to a functioning lunar settlement — complete with roads, drones, robotic vehicles, power grids, communication networks and eventually astronauts living and working across vast stretches of the Moon’s South Pole.

At NASA Headquarters on Tuesday, officials offered the clearest picture yet of what they call “Moon Base”, an ambitious long-term effort aimed at establishing humanity’s first sustained foothold on another world.

“The Moon Base will be America’s and humanity’s first outpost on another celestial world,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said as scale models of lunar landers and robotic vehicles lined the stage behind him.

NASA officials repeatedly stressed that this would not be a single giant base suddenly appearing on the lunar surface. Instead, they described an evolving network of missions, experiments and robotic systems designed to gradually learn how humans can survive in one of the harshest environments imaginable.

“The moon base is as beautiful as it is hostile,” Isaacman said, describing temperatures that can swing from above 250 degrees in sunlight to below minus 200 degrees in darkness.

For NASA, the lunar South Pole is especially important because scientists believe permanently shadowed craters there may contain water ice — a resource that could eventually support astronauts and even produce rocket fuel for deeper space missions.

But the agency also admitted how little is still known.

“It dawns on us every day how little we know of the lunar surface,” Moon Base programme executive Carlos Garcia Golan said.

To close those knowledge gaps, NASA is betting heavily on commercial partners.

The agency announced new contracts for robotic lunar rovers from Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, along with cargo lander missions involving Blue Origin, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines.

NASA also unveiled plans for “MoonFall”, a mission involving hopping drones capable of exploring difficult terrain and scouting future landing zones.

The drones are expected to fly short distances across the lunar surface before settling into fixed positions that could eventually serve as navigation beacons, observation stations or communications nodes.

Agency officials described a future lunar landscape where habitats, power systems, mining areas and science stations may stretch across hundreds of square miles.

“It ends up sprawling a little bit more like a city as you start building it out,” chief architect Nujoud Merancy said.

Unlike Apollo, which relied almost entirely on government systems, NASA now says commercial industry will play a central role in building the Moon Base.

“We are leveraging the NASA playbook from the 1960s,” Isaacman said, “figuring out what works and what doesn’t in this epic science of survival.”

NASA officials said the Moon would also serve as a testing ground for eventual human missions to Mars.

“It would be nice to do that when you’re four days away from home than many months away from home,” Isaacman said.

The renewed lunar push comes as China accelerates its own Moon programme, including plans for an International Lunar Research Station later this decade. NASA officials did not directly frame the Moon Base effort as a geopolitical competition, but repeatedly emphasised American leadership and long-term presence.

“This time to stay,” Isaacman said, “we will not give up the moon again.”

IANS