NASA halts work on Gateway to develop a lunar base

NASA is halting work on the lunar Gateway — the orbital outpost it has spent years designing with international partners — and redirecting the program toward a surface base. The pivot, announced at an "Ignition" event at NASA Headquarters on March 24, is the most significant architecture change to the Artemis Moon-return program since it was chartered. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, sworn in last December, put it plainly: the Gateway, in its current form, is not required to land on the Moon. A base is.

"We are calling today's event Ignition because it represents the start of a transformative journey for NASA," Isaacman said at the event, framing the surface as the real objective. The orbital waypoint that was supposed to bridge crewed landings can wait.

The base plan runs three phases. Phase One, 2026 through 2028, is about getting to the Moon reliably and often — a significant increase in cadence for Commercial Lunar Payload Services deliveries, advancing the Lunar Terrain Vehicle program, and getting ground truth on base locations at the south pole. Phase Two, 2029 through 2031, begins building out communications, navigation, power, and surface infrastructure while supporting two crewed missions per year. Phase Three, beginning in 2032, enables what program executive Carlos Garcia-Galan called "long distance and long duration human exploration," with routine logistics and cargo return. NASA has budgeted $10 billion each for the first two phases; Phase Three carries an additional $10 billion or more, running through at least 2036.

What NASA is not building, at least for now, is the Gateway. The orbital station — designed to operate in a highly elliptical lunar orbit as a crewed landing waypoint — is being sidelined. "It should not really surprise anyone that we are pausing Gateway in its current form," Isaacman said. He left the door open: "Shifting NASA workforce priorities to the surface... does not preclude revisiting the orbital outpost in the future."

The hardware already built for Gateway will not simply migrate to the surface. The Power and Propulsion Element (PPE), built by Maxar subsidiary Vantor, and the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO), built by Northrop Grumman, are both under contract and in integration testing. Repurposing them for surface use "is not simple." The base's new requirements — different thermal environments, landing loads, surface mobility — mean some redesign is likely. International partners Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates have contributed to Gateway development; NASA said it will work to reshape those commitments but gave no details.

The shift requires congressional sign-off. A budget reconciliation bill passed last July appropriated $2.6 billion for Gateway, with the program defined in law as "an outpost in orbit around the Moon." Redirecting those funds means redirecting the law.

Also in the announcement: a revamped Lunar Terrain Vehicle program. NASA concluded the current approach would miss its 2030 crew-capable rover target. Instead of the existing development path, the agency is issuing a draft request for proposals for simplified rovers that can be built faster and upgraded later. On the same timeline pressure, NASA is putting out a call for commercial companies to propose alternatives to the NASA-run Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule — a significant signal that the agency is looking to buy transportation services rather than own the stack.

Among the new capabilities being planned for the base: MoonFall, a drone that hops between locations on the lunar surface. Built on the legacy of Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter that flew 72 times before it stopped phoning home, MoonFall is intended to scout terrain and support surface operations. Whether the engineering gap from Martian atmospheric flight to lunar vacuum is manageable or substantial remains an open question — the drone is uncontracted and the engineering work is not done.

Also on the horizon: Space Reactor-1 Freedom, a robotic spacecraft propelled by a nuclear reactor, would demonstrate faster travel to Mars and drop off a payload of Ingenuity-like robotic helicopters before the end of 2028. That's a roughly 28-month development window for a nuclear-propelled interplanetary spacecraft — aggressive by any measure.

Isaacman has also set a target of ramping Artemis from one mission every few years to twice per year after Artemis V, scheduled for 2028. That cadence assumes the surface infrastructure, rovers, and cargo delivery pipeline all come together on schedule — a significant assumption given where the program stood last month.

The competitive backdrop is not abstract. China has announced a crewed Moon landing target of 2030, and Isaacman's changes are, in part, a response to that timeline. Whether a seven-year surface base build can outrace a Chinese crewed landing is the question the Artemis program just bet $20 billion on answering.