Special to CosmicTribune.com, May 28, 2026

Geostrategy-Direct

By Richard Fisher

While President Donald Trump wants to have Americans return to the Moon by 2028, there is a great deal of preparation necessary to meet that goal, and on May 26, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) held a press conference to explain schedules and new program decisions for what is an aggressive early Moon Base program.

This press conference featured NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, Dr. Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate and Carlos Garcia-Galan, NASA Program Executive for the Moon Base, and was a follow-on to the March 24 NASA “Ignition” briefing featuring these same NASA officials.

Isaacman stated:

“The Moon Base will be America’s and humanity’s first outpost on another celestial world…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. We are grateful for President Trump’s leadership, the bipartisan commitment from Congress, our industry and international partners, and the dedicated NASA workforce whose expertise enables us to achieve the near-impossible.”

Most of the briefing concerned three early unmanned projects, Moon Base 1; Moon Base 2; and Moon Base 3, all of which should be launched by the end of 2026.

These are the first objectives of the “Phase 1” of the Moon base project, that will last until 2029 and as explained by Garcia-Galan, “will have 25 lunches, 21 landings, and we’re planning to deliver about four metric tons of cargo to the surface of the moon. And we want to graduate from that to 60 metric tons to 150 by the time we get to phase 3.”

Moon Base 1 will see a Blue Origin Blue Moon Mk 1 lunar lander conduct Lunar Plume Surface Studies at the South Pole’s Shackleton Connecting Ridge, using laser instruments to analyze Moon dust plumes caused by landing thrusters, to assist better precision landings by future lunar landers.

NASA will also purchase up to two more Blue Moon Mk 1 landers with funding of up to $468.4 million, to include deployment of the Viper unmanned Moon rover in 2027, which will greatly assist Blue Origin in its development of the larger Blue Moon Mk 2 manned lunar lander, for possible use in 2028 and beyond.

Moon Base 2 will use the Astrobiotic Corporation’s Griffin lander to transport over 1,100 pounds of cargo to another lunar location.

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  NASA sets aggressive early Moon base objectives