On May 26, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman stood at agency headquarters in Washington and gave the lunar program something it hasn’t had before: a name with “base” in it. The program is called Moon Base. Three uncrewed landers are targeting the lunar south pole before the end of 2026. Behind them, $440 million in contracts for two crewed rovers. Behind that, a phased timeline stretching into the 2030s for power grids, hopping drones, and eventually semi-permanent crew presence.
It’s the most specific Moon timeline NASA has published since the Artemis program started. Here’s what’s actually on each lander and what the phased plan looks like.
The three missions
Moon Base I flies on Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance lander, targeting no earlier than fall 2026. The landing site is the Shackleton Connecting Ridge — the ridgeline between Shackleton crater and the broader south polar plateau. The south pole is the site for a reason. Permanently shadowed craters there may hold water ice within meters of the surface — usable for drinking water, oxygen, and rocket propellant if it can be extracted. And the crater rims catch near-continuous sunlight, which solves the power problem that killed every Apollo surface mission after a few days.
The payload is reconnaissance. A Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) instrument will measure how landing thrusters disturb regolith — data that informs every future landing site selection. If your engine exhaust blows loose surface material into nearby hardware at 1 km/s, you need to know that before you park a rover next door. A Laser Retroreflective Array lets orbiting spacecraft pinpoint the lander’s position via reflected laser light. Before you pour a foundation, you study the ground.
Moon Base II rides Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, also targeted for 2026. It delivers about 500 kg of cargo, including Astrolab’s FLIP rover — a compact mobility platform that will validate driving, payload delivery, and remote operations on the lunar surface without astronauts present. FLIP is a pathfinder: it tests the operational patterns that the larger crewed rovers will rely on starting in 2028.
Moon Base III launches on Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C Trinity lander. Its anchor experiment is Lunar Vertex, an investigation into lunar swirls — those strange bright markings on the surface whose origin is still debated. The leading hypothesis is that localized magnetic anomalies shield regolith from solar wind darkening, but it isn’t settled. Moon Base III also carries payloads from ESA and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, making it the most internationally collaborative of the three.
Two rovers, $440 million
NASA awarded contracts to two companies for the first Lunar Terrain Vehicles (LTVs) — the Moon buggies astronauts will drive starting with Artemis IV.
Astrolab gets $219 million for CLV-1, a ~900 kg crewed rover adapted from the company’s FLEX architecture. It tops out at about 10 km/h on level terrain and folds into a compact stowed configuration for lander delivery. Lunar Outpost gets $220 million for Pegasus, a lighter rover that can operate crewed, autonomous, or teleoperated, runs over 14 km/h, and is rated for a full year of surface operations. The autonomous mode is the key detail: Pegasus can land on a cargo lander months before astronauts arrive, drive itself to the planned landing site, and be waiting when the crew touches down. That’s the operational model NASA is testing with FLIP on Moon Base II first.
Both companies have 18 months to finalize designs, conduct crewed evaluations on Earth analogue terrain, and qualify flight hardware. The target: at least one rover on the surface before Artemis IV puts astronauts at the south pole in early 2028.
The three-phase plan
NASA is building the base in three phases.
Phase 1 (now through 2029) is about access. Prove that commercial landers can reliably reach the south polar region. Gather surface data. Test mobility hardware. The three 2026 missions are the first moves.
Phase 2 (2029 to early 2030s) adds infrastructure: a solar power grid, cargo depots, and MoonFall — a batch of three or four small hopping robots, launching in 2028 on a Firefly Aerospace lander, that will scout the perimeter of the eventual base footprint. They hop because there’s no atmosphere to fly in — each unit uses small thrusters to make ballistic leaps across the terrain, covering ground that wheeled rovers can’t reach easily on the heavily cratered south polar surface. Carlos García-Galán, NASA’s Moon Base program manager, described the planned coverage area as “hundreds of square miles.”
Phase 3 (starting ~2032) targets semi-permanent crew presence. Pressurized habitats, extended stays, and the shift from visiting to staying.
The crewed timeline runs in parallel. Artemis III, now scheduled for late 2027, will test a Human Landing System in Earth orbit — it doesn’t go to the Moon. Artemis IV, in early 2028, is designated as the first crewed lunar landing of the Artemis era. From Artemis V onward (late 2028 at the earliest), NASA intends yearly landings.
What this means for lunar observers
I want to flag something for anyone who points a telescope at the Moon with any regularity: the south polar region is about to get traffic.
Three landers this year. At least one rover driving autonomously before 2028. Hopping drones by the end of the decade. Every powered descent kicks up regolith and produces a brief thermal event. Amateur groups have detected lunar impact flashes for years — NELIOTA at the National Observatory of Athens runs a dedicated monitoring program. As commercial and government landers multiply at the south pole, the region becomes worth watching more closely.
You won’t resolve the landers themselves through a backyard scope — they’re meter-scale objects at 384,000 km. But descent plumes and landing events happen at scales that occasionally register in sensitive video monitoring setups, and more traffic means more data points. If you run a lunar monitoring rig — even a modest one with a 200 mm Dobsonian and a high-frame-rate camera — the south polar limb is where you’d want to point it during any announced landing window.
The science return is also worth following. Lunar Vertex could answer the swirl question that’s been open since the Apollo era. SCALPSS data will shape how every future mission selects its landing site. And MoonFall will map terrain at ground level that no orbiter has resolved.
The New Glenn question
The timing deserves a mention. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket exploded on Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral on May 28 — two days after the Moon Base announcement. A cryogenic leak froze a hydraulic line during a static fire test, causing a thrust anomaly that destroyed the vehicle and at least one lightning protection tower. No one was hurt. The FAA identified nine corrective actions and won’t clear the next New Glenn flight until they’re verified.
Moon Base I launches on New Glenn. Whether the pad explosion delays the fall 2026 target is an open question. Blue Origin hasn’t confirmed a revised schedule. It’s possible Moon Base I slips into 2027.
But the announcement itself is the news. Three missions funded. Two rovers under contract. A program with a name, a manager, and a timeline measured in months. For the Moon, that’s new.