Two months after NASA promised what seems impossible, to build the first human colony on the Moon during the next decade, the heads of the US space agency have detailed the first steps to make that dream a reality. This Tuesday, Jared Isaacman, the administrator of the US space agency, announced that before the end of 2026 he will launch three robotic missions to the lunar surface, carried out by private companies.
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The first of these, scheduled for the fall of 2026, will be the Moon Base 1 mission and NASA has entrusted it to Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company. It will be destined for the south pole of the Moon, where the US plans to build its base. This mission will mark the debut of Bezos’s lunar lander, the Blue Moon, whose second version will also compete with Elon Musk’s Starship to take the first astronauts of the 21st century to set foot on the Moon in the Artemis 4 and Artemis 5 missions.
The Moon Base 2 mission, also planned for this year, will be operated by the company Astrobotics, which will have a second chance to land its Griffin lander on the Moon after failing in January 2024. And the third mission of the new US program to build its lunar base will also be entrusted to another commercial provider, Intuitive Machines, which had a troubled landing of its robotic probe Athena in 2025, after another previous failed attempt in 2024.
Spanish engineer Carlos García Galán is in charge of developing Isaacman’s ambitious plans to establish the first human colony on the Moon. García Galán is the director of NASA’s Moon Base program and, during Tuesday’s briefing, he explained the three phases the space agency envisions: the first, starting this year with the first announced missions, will be aimed at conducting tests and learning how astronauts can survive long stays in an environment more hostile than that experienced by the Apollo mission astronauts between 1969 and 1972.
The goal is to colonize the lunar south pole, with temperatures dropping to 200 degrees below zero during the two-week-long nights and where there are craters with perpetual darkness. And to thoroughly study that area, where the permanent colony will later be established, NASA plans to bring vehicles there that astronauts can use to move around the Moon, as well as multiple drones and scientific instruments. That will be the task of the 21 missions to the lunar surface that the agency has planned between 2026 and 2029 to complete the initial reconnaissance phase of the Moon Base program, aimed at deploying its full potential during the next decade and becoming a station to plan the next leap: taking astronauts to Mars.
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An ambition that depends on Bezos and Musk
When the launch of the Artemis 2 mission had suffered two delays, last March NASA made public a much greater ambition: that first manned lunar mission in more than half a century would be just the first step towards creating the first human colony on the Moon.
During his tenure, Isaacman has set out for NASA to recover its original spirit of “making the seemingly impossible possible.” This is his approach to fulfilling the goals imposed by the US president, who in his decree to ensure US superiority in space committed to creating permanent bases on the lunar surface and equipping them with nuclear power. Such goals are hardly feasible in the short term, when NASA still does not have a spacecraft capable of landing astronauts on the Moon and when its recent commercial missions to land robots on the Earth’s natural satellite have had very modest results.
If that situation changes and NASA manages to have a lunar lander in the short term, a task it has entrusted to the companies Blue Origin (owned by Jeff Bezos) and SpaceX (owned by Elon Musk), the plan is to test that spacecraft in a near-Earth orbit in 2027 during the Artemis 3 mission. And if that test is successful, the US intends to attempt two landings on the Moon during 2028, with the Artemis 4 and Artemis 5 missions.
Assuming those plans come to fruition, the second phase of lunar colonization would begin from 2029, with the creation of the first habitable bases, which will be provisional and operate with energy provided by solar and nuclear facilities. From 2032, the bases could already be permanent, built with the support of construction robots. That first human colony on another world would have pressurized transport vehicles to cover long distances, a telecommunications system — both on the surface and in lunar orbit — and nuclear power plants capable of providing constant energy to the base during the cold and long lunar nights.
