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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, with acting Associate Administrator Lori Glaze and Moon Base Program Executive Carlos Garcia-Galan, holds a news conference on updated plans for the agency\u2019s Moon Base initiative for a long-term lunar presence, at NASA headquarters in Washington DC on May 26, 2026.
\n | Photo Credit: REUTERS<\/p>\n
\u201cThe past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,\u201d the English novelist L.P. Hartley wrote famously in his 1953 novel The Go-Between. In a peculiar twist, the same cannot be said of the Moon. It is not a foreign country, or even a foreign world: the U.S.\u2019s manoeuvring to beat China to the satellite has increasingly meant the Moon is an extension of the Earth\u2019s geopolitics and political culture.<\/p>\n
At the ninth India-U.S. Civil Space Joint Working Group meeting at Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) headquarters last week, NASA invited the organisation to participate in its \u2018Moon Base\u2019 programme, ostensibly as part of the two countries\u2019 Artemis Accords partnership. According to NASA, the facility will be built piece by piece near the Moon\u2019s south pole, where sunlight is available for longer durations and where permanently shadowed craters hold significant water-ice deposits. The target is for it to be humankind\u2019s first outpost on a new celestial body, taking shape around 2030.<\/p>\n
NASA is leaning heavily on private industry for this, having already awarded contracts to Astrolab (worth $219 million) and Lunar Outpost ($220 million) for lunar terrain vehicles, Blue Origin ($188 million) for delivery task orders, and Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines ($600 million) for four robotic missions to the Moon to deliver equipment. Intuitive is also developing a relay satellite under a separate contract.<\/p>\n
Further, as part of NASA chief Jared Isaacman\u2019s overhaul of the Artemis programme earlier this year, in no small part responding to the Trump administration\u2019s December 2025 space policy calling for securing U.S. interests in cislunar space, the profiles of the Artemis III and IV Missions changed. Now, Mission III will be a crewed test flight in Earth orbit in 2027 and Mission IV will attempt the first lunar landing under the programme in 2028. Taken together, the \u2018Moon Base\u2019 is effectively the next phase of the new Artemis programme, tasked with keeping \u2014 intermittently at first, and eventually continuously \u2014 Artemis astronauts on the Moon.<\/p>\n