NASA plans a permanent human presence on the moon

NASA is intensifying its plans to allow people to live permanently on the moon and is pushing ahead at full speed. Dozens of missions will be used to bring landers, drones and human-controlled rover vehicles to Earth's satellite in the coming years, as NASA boss Jared Isaacman announced at a press conference. "America is returning to the moon - and this time to stay." This year alone there will be three unmanned missions to the moon, and the European space agency Esa will also be involved in the third. The landers are to be built by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin, the drones by Firefly Aerospace and the rovers by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost. From around the early 2030s, the lunar station - which, according to NASA, could be hundreds of square kilometers in size - will be permanently inhabitable by humans. Isaacman completely overturned lunar plans. NASA boss Isaacman overturned the agency's lunar plans just a few months ago and announced the plan for a permanent human presence on Earth's satellite. The background is also the global competition in space. There has been a new race by spacefaring nations to the moon for years. The USA's biggest competitor is China, which has the goal of putting people on the moon by 2030. Russia also plans to do so, but is facing delays due to economic difficulties. In April, NASA's "Artemis 2" mission brought people close to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen launched from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida and then flew around the moon before returning to Earth and landing in the Pacific near San Diego. During their flight they traveled further from Earth than humans had ever done before.