NASA Plans For Up To Three More Lunar Missions Before The End Of 2026

NASA has shared a preliminary (and seemingly ambitious) schedule for the first three Moon Base missions. The organization completed its crewed Artemis II mission in April, but that lunar flyby was always just one part of a larger plan to build a permanent presence on the Moon. These upcoming Moon Base missions will be used to test rovers and landers developed as part of new contracts NASA announced alongside its plan, and to study surface conditions for future lunar landings.

The first mission, Moon Base I, is supposed to launch no earlier than fall 2026, and will deliver payloads including a Lunar Plume-Surface Studies instrument and cameras using a Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance lander. Later this year, Moon Base II will use Astrobiotic’s Griffin lander to drop off Astrolab’s FLIP rover to help the startup design future lunar terrain vehicles. Finally, at some other point in 2026, Moon Base III will use Intuitive Machine’s Nova-C Trinity lander to study lunar swirls and drop off payloads for the European Space Agency and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute.

NASA maintains multiple different contracts for both the delivery of payloads and the development of the rovers and landers, which can make tracking who’s doing what complicated. Both Astrolab and Lunar Outpost have been awarded contracts to develop and build lunar terrain vehicles (LTV), to the tune of $219 million and $220 million, respectively. Meanwhile, Blue Origin was awarded $118 million to deliver those rovers to the Moon, and the company is also developing landers NASA will use for future missions. NASA recently completed testing the Blue Origin lander it plans to use for the first Moon Base mission, and shared this month that it has already received a second-generation prototype designed to carry crew for future testing and training.

These new missions to test lunar landers and rovers are part of an updated schedule NASA announced in February, that delayed humans’ return to the lunar surface until 2028. Before astronauts even reach the Moon, the organization also plans to send drones to survey landing sites as part of its MoonFall mission.