NASA will give an update on Tuesday afternoon (May 26) about its plans to build a moon base, and you can watch it live.
The agency will host a press conference Tuesday at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. “to share Moon Base plans and highlight progress toward a sustained presence on the lunar surface,” NASA officials wrote in a media advisory on Wednesday (May 20).
You can watch the event here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA.
During the event, NASA leaders “will discuss program progress, including new industry partners and mission plans,” agency officials added in the advisory.
Those leaders are:
- NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman
- Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator, Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate
- Carlos García-Galán, program executive, Moon Base
The moon base is a core part of NASA’s Artemis program of crewed lunar exploration. Artemis aims to establish a permanent human presence on and around the moon over the next decade or so, developing knowledge and skills that can help get astronauts to Mars in the not-too-distant future.
Two Artemis missions have launched to date: the uncrewed Artemis 1 flight to lunar orbit in late 2022 and Artemis 2, which sent four astronauts around the moon and back to Earth last month.
We got a big update about NASA’s moon strategy in late March, just a week before Artemis 2 lifted off. In that news drop, the agency revealed that it’s pausing work on Gateway, a small space station planned for lunar orbit that was long a key piece of Artemis’ architecture, to focus on the surface base.
And there was another big change in late February: Isaacman announced that the Artemis 3 mission, which is slated to launch in mid to late 2027, will no longer land astronauts on the moon. Instead, it will test docking operations between the Orion crew capsule and one or both of Artemis’ privately developed lunar landers (SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon) in Earth orbit.
The first crewed lunar landing since the Apollo days will now take place on Artemis 4, which NASA wants to launch in late 2028. That will help lay the foundation for the moon base, which will be built near the south pole between 2032 and 2036, if all goes to plan.