Nasa hijacks its own moon plan: $20 bn lunar base and a 2028 mars shot with recycled parts
NASA just torched its own roadmap. A single slide deck shown to contractors last Tuesday scrapped the orbiting Gateway station, swapped Boeing’s lander for SpaceX’s still-exploding Starship, and told partners to deliver a permanent Moon base—complete with roads, power plants and 3-D printed huts—before 2030. Price tag for the opening act: $20 billion in the next two years alone.
Gateway becomes a spare-parts bin
The agency’s lunar pivot is brutal. Gateway, once hyped as a mini-ISS circling the Moon, will be stripped for aluminum and avionics. Robotic landers—some already built for the defunct project—will instead touch down every six months starting next week, testing mesh satellite relays and sintered-dust landing pads. “We’re not building a Hilton in orbit,” program director Carlos García-Galán told engineers. “We’re building the driveway first, then the house.”
Phase two: a fleet of reusable hoppers, fission reactors and bulldozers. Phase three: pressurized rovers that double as emergency shelters. All hardware must lift on rockets that do not yet exist, paid for by a Congress staring at a $3 trillion deficit in 2036.
Starship or bust, mars waits for no one
While politicians argue over appropriations, NASA is already cutting metal for Space Reactor-1 Freedom, a nuclear-powered mothership designed to hurl Mars helicopters in 2028. The craft borrows fuel tanks from Gateway’s cancelled propulsion module and a reactor initially meant for deep-space lasers. If Starship misses its landing—as it did twice last month—Freedom could still ride a Delta IV Heavy, although the mission would arrive with half the cargo and zero margin for error.
Administrator Jared Isaacman, the billionaire-turned-astronaut now running the agency, ended the briefing with a line that sounded like a campaign ad: “America does not retreat from the Moon.” He left out the footnote: retreat is unnecessary when you never actually arrive.
93 billion dollars—that’s the inspector general’s estimate for Artemis through 2025. Every milestone red. Every contractor late. And yet the new directive demands twice the deliverables in half the time. The Moon base alone is projected at $30 billion this decade, money Congress has not appropriated, from a treasury already bleeding cash.
The math is simple, the politics ugly. If the first robotic lander crashes next week, the whole calendar slips, the Mars shot slips, and Isaacman’s promise becomes another press release floating in low-Earth orbit. NASA has recycled its hardware. It has not recycled the one thing it actually needs: time.