NASA provided new details on its plan for a permanent base on the moon, with the space agency already ordering drones, landers and rovers.
On Tuesday, NASA awarded two companies contracts to develop 21st-century versions of the moon buggies astronauts drove on the lunar surface during the 1970s, The New York Times reported.
Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colorado, and Venturi Astrolab of Hawthorne, California, will each receive about $220 million to build the vehicles, according to the newspaper.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will provide a pair of landers to deliver moon buggies near the moon’s south pole, The Associated Press reported. The contract is worth $468 million, the Times reported.
Firefly Aerospace, which landed successfully on the moon last year, will deliver the first drones to the moon, according to the AP.
“The Moon Base will be America’s and humanity’s first outpost on another celestial world,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement. “Every mission, crewed and uncrewed, will be a learning opportunity as we return to the lunar surface, build the infrastructure to stay, and master the skills required to live and operate in one of the most demanding and dangerous environments imaginable.
“We will go for the science, for all we stand to gain from an economic and technological perspective, for the innovations that will make life better here on Earth, and to prepare for where we will inevitably go next.”
Isaacman added that construction of the moon bases will be in phases.
“We are not jumping right into the glass dome moon base as a service,” he said. “Because the moon base is as beautiful as it is hostile,” he added.
NASA said that the first phase, targeted for launch “no earlier than fall 2026,” is about “demonstrating that the technology works as intended and that the private companies supplying much of the hardware are capable of delivering the products NASA is spending billions of dollars to procure.”
The second phase will deliver more than 1,100 pounds of cargo on the Griffin lander built by Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based aerospace company.
The third phase will fly the first payload “selected through NASA’s Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon initiative,” the agency said.
The goal of the moon base is to encourage a lunar economy while conducting scientific research, Isaacson said. It will also be used as a steppingstone toward realizing an expedition to Mars.
“For those waiting patiently, the grand return is close at hand and we will not slow down,” Isaacman said. “We are really just getting started.”