Last month, Isaacman announced that NASA had canceled a plan to build a space station in orbit around the moon and will instead repurpose the components of that station to construct a $20 billion base on the lunar surface.
That announcement followed an even bigger announcement in February, when Isaacman overhauled NASA’s Artemis return-to-the-moon program with the goal of increasing the pace of launches ahead of a targeted moon landing in 2028.
The changes included adding a mission, Artemis III, in mid-2027, to test rendezvous and docking technologies in low-Earth orbit with one or both of the lunar landers that SpaceX and Blue Origin are developing. If that’s successful, NASA then intends to launch the Artemis IV mission to land on the moon the following year. The agency’s plan calls for one of those commercially built vehicles to dock with its Orion spacecraft then carry astronauts to the lunar surface.
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