NASA just abandoned a big moon project for a chance to beat China

NASA will shelve its plan for a small lunar space station in favor of building a base directly on the moon.

For years, the U.S. space agency talked up Gateway, a station that would circle the moon and act as both a lab and pit stop for lunar missions. Now, after another hard look at time, money, and logistics, officials say executing that project would only slow them down on the way to the main event: getting astronauts back on the moon — before China beats them to it. 

As NASA prepares to launch Artemis II, a 10-day crewed flight around the moon that could lift off as early as Wednesday, April 1, agency leaders are overhauling the moon-landing missions that will follow it, trying to ensure the first boots in the dust since 1972 are American. That means sticking a landing during the Artemis IV mission in 2028. 

But as for NASA's time crunch for the moon base, that part is largely self-inflicted. A target of 2030 for installing the first pieces of the astronaut habitat stemmed from Gateway plans the agency sold to stakeholders years ago. To keep the date, the agency says it must skip the space station — the project that helped establish the timeline in the first place. 

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in December that mandated some kind of lunar outpost by 2030, but there's a catch: The directive can only set the policy deadline and has no control over the funding. So while NASA wants $20 billion over seven years to build the newly envisioned base, it lacks a financial guarantee from Congress to cover the full cost. Meanwhile, many U.S. lawmakers are focused on trying to save other space and Earth science initiatives Trump wants to cut. 

"I can't imagine anyone would rather their astronauts be above the moon looking down where all the action is, as opposed to being on the surface itself," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. 

The sweeping change to NASA's lunar ambitions came during an agency-hosted meeting in Washington this week dubbed Ignition, which sought to galvanize support from contractors, international space partners, and lawmakers. 

Astronauts would build the moon base at the lunar south pole, a region about the size of Virginia. The area has deep, shadowed craters that may hold ancient ice and other frozen material. If NASA can mine those resources, crews could use them for living and working on the surface without needing constant resupply from Earth.

NASA wants to build this moon base, with the first pieces installed in 2030. Credit: NASA illustration

The new plan rolls out in three phases. Over the next two years, NASA wants to prove it can hit the lunar surface often and reliably, using roughly two-dozen launches and more than 20 mostly commercial landings to drop off robots at the south pole, scout for water, and test nuclear-powered heaters that can maintain hardware in long stretches of darkness and cold. 

Around 2029, heftier landers would bring in power and communications gear, and rugged rovers would start leveling the ground for living quarters, assisted by a pressurized rover that would double as a mobile home. Then, in the 2030s, crews would get several habitat modules to support longer stays, as well as a steady stream of cargo flights carrying supplies and returning lunar samples to Earth.

A major goal of this final phase is learning how to use the moon's own soil, called regolith, said Carlos Garcia-Galan, the moon base program executive. NASA plans to test 3D printing and other methods to turn the material into bricks, and to extract oxygen, water, and other elements that could be useful for supporting the base.

NASA argues that learning to live on the moon is a necessary step toward getting humans to Mars. If something were to break, a Martian crew would be stuck for months in a distant, hostile world. 

By running a base on the moon, the agency hopes to work through the challenges of keeping people alive, especially during the long lunar nights of extreme cold, fixing critical gear without quick resupply and using local resources while astronauts are still only a three‑day trip away from home.

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"Clearly, when we get to Mars, we're going to need some of this capability," Garcia-Galan said, "and when we get there, it's going to be tried and true."

As for the sidelined Gateway project, NASA says the space station hasn't been canceled and could be reprioritized later. But given the agency intends to repurpose some of the hardware for the moon base, its future is uncertain. 

Test labs and other equipment that were built for the space station would shift to serving surface missions. By scrapping Gateway for parts, officials think they can pay for the base without a massive top-line increase.

"It does look like science fiction, but guess what," Garcia-Galan said, "we're planning to turn that into reality."