NASA plans moon base, nuclear spacecraft in multibillion-dollar moon program expansion

By Joey Roulette

WASHINGTON, March 24 (Reuters) – NASA said on Tuesday it had canceled plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and would instead use components from the project to build a $20 billion base on the moon’s surface, while also planning to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars.

The head of the US space agency, Jared Isaacman, an appointee of President Donald Trump who took office at NASA in December, announced a series of unprecedented changes to the Artemis lunar program that would increase “humanity’s footprint in space, as the United States strives to return to the Moon before China sends its astronauts there around 2030.

Plans for the lunar base included a goal of sending more robotic landers, deploying a fleet of drones and laying the groundwork for the use of nuclear power on the lunar surface in the coming years.

“This revised step-by-step approach to learning, developing muscle memory, reducing risk and gaining confidence is exactly how NASA achieved the impossible in the 1960s,” Isaacman said, referring to the U.S. Apollo program.

NUCLEAR-POWERED MARS MISSION

NASA also revealed plans to launch a spacecraft called Space Reactor 1 Freedom to Mars before the end of 2028 in a mission it said would demonstrate advanced nuclear electric propulsion in deep space. NASA called this a major breakthrough in moving nuclear power and propulsion from the laboratory to space. NASA said the spacecraft, once it reaches Earth’s neighboring planet, will deploy helicopters to explore Mars.

The Lunar Gateway station, largely already built with contractors Northrop Grumman and Lanteris Space Systems, a subsidiary of Intuitive Machines, was intended to be a space station in lunar orbit.

“It really shouldn’t surprise anyone that we are suspending Gateway in its current form and focusing on infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the lunar surface,” Isaacman told a crowd of foreign delegates, businesses and members of Congress during a daylong event at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Repurposing the Lunar Gateway to create a base on the Moon’s surface – a difficult undertaking – leaves uncertain the future roles of Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency in the Artemis program, three key NASA partners who had agreed to provide components for the orbital station.

“Despite some very real material and schedule challenges, we can repurpose equipment and commitments from international partners to support surface program and other objectives,” Isaacman said.

European Space Agency chief Josef Aschbacher, who attended the event, told Reuters he would study the new plans and continue talking about them with NASA.

Lunar Gateway was designed to serve as both a research platform and a transfer station that astronauts would use to board lunar landers before descending to the lunar surface. NASA’s current plans call for astronauts to land on the surface of the Moon in 2028.

Isaacman’s changes in recent weeks to America’s flagship moon program are reshaping billions of dollars of contracts under the Artemis umbrella, sending companies scrambling to meet added U.S. urgency as China advances toward its own moon landing planned for 2030.

LUNAR LANDER PROJECTS BEHIND SCHEDULE

At the heart of the Artemis program is its astronaut lunar lander program, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin both racing to develop lunar landers for NASA. The two companies, which were each targeting a first crewed moon landing in 2028, have fallen behind schedule.

Isaacman and other top NASA officials made little mention Tuesday of the two companies’ plans to accelerate development of their landers to meet the astronaut landing deadline of 2028. But Lori Glaze, NASA’s acting associate administrator, suggested the companies want to dock with the Orion astronaut capsule “in a different orbit between the Earth and the Moon than planned, before transporting the astronauts to the surface.”

Glaze said that “SpaceX is considering alternatives to its current spacecraft design” for the lunar lander, “while also implementing a more streamlined approach to try to speed things up and move things forward.”

NASA’s inspector general said this month that SpaceX, committed in 2021 to the program’s first astronaut on the moon, was two years behind schedule, while the company and Blue Origin faced a list of complex technical challenges before they could fly humans.

But as part of the agency’s Artemis shakeup, Glaze said it would use the first lander ready, instead of sticking to a predetermined order of mission assignments.

The Artemis program, launched in 2017 during Trump’s first term as president, envisions regular lunar missions as NASA’s long-awaited follow-up to its early lunar missions under the Apollo program that ended in 1972.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette; editing by Andrew Heavens, Jan Harvey and Lincoln Feast.)