NASA announces new missions to prepare a lunar base

NASA reaffirmed its ambitions to conquer the Moon by announcing, on Tuesday June 30, new missions to help with the future creation of a base on the surface of the star.

Carried out in collaboration with three American companies developing lunar robots, these four missions with a total budget of around 600 million dollars (around 525 million euros) are in addition to others announced in May by the agency. They will consist of transporting scientific instruments to the Moon to prepare the ground for this construction.

This announcement comes as the American space agency's lunar ambitions were undermined by the spectacular explosion at the end of May of the New Glenn rocket from the Blue Origin company of multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos. Despite this disappointment, senior NASA officials were reassuring on Tuesday and said they were considering “other options” to send the lander developed by Blue Origin in the event that New Glenn could not be used in time.

Furthermore, the agency intends to “carry out at least one mission in 2026” via another company, underlined Carlos Garcia-Galan, NASA manager for the lunar base.

Competition from China

To meet its tight schedule, the space agency notably raised on Tuesday the possibility of reassigning a Mars rover to lunar use.

After working for years on the construction of a space station around the Moon called Gateway, NASA announced in March that it was now focusing on the creation of ground infrastructure, for which $20 billion was promised. This base is planned near the lunar South Pole, a strategic area due to the presence of water in the form of ice in its soils, and should begin to be built from 2029, she announced at the time.

Designed to compete with China, which also aims to send men to the Moon and establish a base there, this very ambitious plan still remains vague in several respects.

In recent months, the American space agency has begun to detail its vision, which notably includes lunar landing modules, lunar all-terrain vehicles and drones in order to study the terrain and then gradually build infrastructure such as an electrical network and pressurized habitats.