NASA officials on Tuesday detailed the space agency’s plans to establish a lunar base, where astronauts could live and work long-term with the ultimate goal of studying the moon and its origins, as well as how best to send the first humans to Mars.“America is returning to the moon,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a news conference from the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. He said that while NASA will be “leveraging” its playbook from the first human moon landing in 1969, this time the goal is to stay.The $20 billion project would be assembled in three different phases that would include uncrewed and crewed missions to the moon to deliver equipment, vehicles and infrastructure, Isaacman said.AdvertisementAdvertisementBuilding a permanent moon base is central to NASA’s Artemis program, which included last month’s historic spaceflight around the moon. NASA said that under Artemis, astronauts will be sent on “increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.”What is ‘moon base’?The space agency describes the base as “a long-term lunar exploration and infrastructure initiative designed to enable sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity at the lunar South Pole.”NASA is envisioning the size of the moon base to be hundreds of square miles, comparable to a large city, like New York or Los Angeles.What is the purpose of moon base?“There’s knowledge to be had, technology to built that will help with life here on Earth. There’s certainly going to be inspiration for the next generation. … There’s a lot of great things that will come from having an outpost on the moon,” Isaacman said.AdvertisementAdvertisement“Number one, we want to be in an environment where we can learn the skills so that astronauts can go and plant the stars and stripes on Mars someday.”Why would moon base be established near the lunar south pole?The region remains largely unexplored, and it’s fart …
