NASA has laid out a detailed roadmap for establishing a permanent base on the Moon, awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to four American companies as part of what the agency is calling its Ignition Moon Base programme. The announcements, made at NASA headquarters in Washington on Tuesday, mark a significant acceleration of US lunar ambitions amid an intensifying competition with China to return humans to the lunar surface.

Under the programme's first phase, robotic landers, hopping drones and terrain vehicles are to be sent to the Moon's south pole — an area of particular scientific and strategic interest because frozen water deposits there could be processed into drinking water, oxygen, and even rocket fuel. Jeff Bezos's space company Blue Origin, along with Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic, and Firefly Aerospace — which successfully landed on the Moon last year — have been selected to build the hardware. Blue Origin's Endurance lander will carry lunar terrain vehicles built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, while Astrobotic's Griffin-1 lander is targeted at Nobile Crater near the south pole. Firefly will deliver the first drones to the Moon. NASA programme executive Carlos García-Galán said this robotic phase should involve around 25 launches and deliver four metric tonnes of cargo before 2029, with the hardware ideally in place before the first Artemis astronauts set foot on the surface, planned for as early as 2028.

A second phase, running from 2029 into the early 2030s, would establish permanent infrastructure including nuclear and solar power facilities and fission reactors. By 2032, NASA envisions astronauts living in semi-permanent habitats, with the base eventually sprawling over hundreds of square miles — its perimeter monitored by stationary drones called MoonFall. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman framed the project in expansive terms, saying the US would "never give up the Moon again" and that the base would foster a lunar economy, enable scientific research, and serve as a stepping stone to Mars. García-Galán envisions the territory markers as a gesture of respect toward other nations' equipment that may be nearby, expecting reciprocity in return.

A key technology underpinning the vision is in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) — the extraction of usable materials directly from the lunar environment rather than importing them from Earth. Oxygen makes up roughly 40 to 45 percent of the mass of lunar regolith, the layer of dust and rock fragments covering the Moon's surface, though it is chemically bound to other elements and cannot simply be breathed. Researchers at the Laboratory of Processes, Materials, and Solar Energy (PROMES-CNRS) in France have demonstrated a solar pyrolysis technique — using intensely focused sunlight to heat regolith to temperatures exceeding 2,000°C in a vacuum, causing the metal oxides to break apart and release oxygen. Early tests extracted oxygen from regolith simulant and produced glass-like byproducts that could be used as construction materials, though yields remain low and the technology requires further refinement before it could operate reliably in the Moon's harsh environment.

Despite the ambition of NASA's timeline, independent experts urge caution. The critical bottleneck remains the human landing system: SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System, contracted to carry astronauts to the surface, has faced repeated setbacks. "The limiting step is getting the astronauts down onto the surface," said Dr Simeon Barber, a lunar scientist at the Open University in the UK, who added that China — which is pressing ahead with its own crewed lunar mission target of 2030 and this week launched the Shenzhou-23 crew to its Tiangong space station — could well get there first. "It would not surprise me at all if China gets there first," Barber said. Nevertheless, NASA's April Artemis II mission, in which four astronauts flew around the Moon and travelled deeper into space than any humans since the Apollo era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, demonstrated that the broader programme is moving forward — even if the most consequential milestones remain years away.