NASA Reveals Stunning Details About Moon Base

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman laid out a plan for a permanent American base on the Moon, a much larger space workforce, and nuclear-powered spacecraft for travel beyond the inner solar system.

Speaking with Turning Point USA’s Frontlines, he called the next stretch one of the most important periods for the agency since Apollo. “We are going back to stay,” he said. “We are returning to the moon. We are building a moon base. We’re commissioning nuclear-powered spacecraft to explore the outer solar system.”

The schedule he described follows a completed Artemis II flight that sent astronauts around the Moon earlier this year. President Donald Trump later gave that crew the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. Artemis III, set for 2027, is meant to test rendezvous and docking in Earth orbit with the Orion spacecraft and commercial lunar landers. Artemis IV, in 2028, is the flight NASA is aiming at for a return of American astronauts to the surface.

The agency reorganized lunar work this year under a Moon Base Program covering surface transportation, science, cargo, habitation and communications. NASA has said it wants a sustained U.S. presence on the Moon by 2030, and that the outpost would also serve as a proving ground for Mars. A specific landing site was not named.

Isaacman said the industry could add tens of thousands of jobs and eventually hundreds of thousands. He pointed to a National Space Transportation Policy that calls for U.S. launch and reentry infrastructure able to handle more than 1,000 launches and reentries a year by 2030. That would mean more engineers, technicians, operators, pilots and astronauts.

Trump signed an executive order in August creating a commission to design a United States Space Academy, with NASA in a central role, to train that workforce. For power farther out, the agency has opened a Space Reactor Office to develop nuclear power and propulsion for the Moon, Mars and the outer solar system, on the argument that solar energy will not be enough.

No budget figure was attached to the base itself. Commercial landers are already written into the Artemis III plan. The same week, SpaceX launched Crew-13 from Cape Canaveral with NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov bound for the International Space Station.