Washington: As part of its push to establish a sustained human presence on the Moon, NASA unveiled plans to deploy autonomous lunar drones, roaming robotic vehicles, and a sprawling communications network across its South Pole region.
During a detailed Moon Base briefing at NASA Headquarters, agency officials said the US space agency was moving beyond symbolic lunar landings toward a long-term operational architecture designed to support astronauts, cargo systems, scientific missions and future exploration of Mars.
One of the centrepieces of the new strategy is “MoonFall”, a drone mission designed to scout difficult lunar terrain, search for water ice and prepare landing sites for future Artemis astronauts.
“These drones will allow us to go, cover a broader range of areas that we and prospect and get that ground truth,” Moon Base programme executive Carlos Garcia Golan said.
NASA’s prestigious Jet Propulsion Laboratory is developing the MoonFall drones, while Firefly Aerospace has been selected to build the carrier spacecraft that will transport them from Earth orbit to the Moon. Launch is targeted for 2028.
The drones are designed to make short “hops” across the lunar surface, exploring permanently shadowed craters and other difficult terrain near the lunar South Pole. NASA officials said the drones would gather high-resolution imagery, map landing sites at centimetre-level precision and test “survive-the-night” technologies capable of enduring the Moon’s extreme temperatures.
“We basically have a range of like one meter dedicated information on the different areas we wanna go to,” Garcia Golan said, describing the harsh and unpredictable environment around the South Pole.
NASA also revealed that future Moon Base infrastructure could resemble a distributed city rather than a compact outpost.
“We envision the moon base to be hundreds of square miles with different assets,” Garcia Golan said.
Agency officials said different components of the base — including habitats, power systems, mining sites and scientific stations — would likely be spread across wide areas because no single location on the Moon offers all the necessary conditions for habitation, energy generation and exploration.
Chief architect Nujoud Merancy said habitats would probably sit on elevated ridges with sunlight access, while nuclear systems may need to remain kilometres away for radiation safety
“It ends up sprawling a little bit more like a city as you start building it out,” she said.
NASA also confirmed plans to create a robust communications and navigation network around the Moon to support the expanding infrastructure.
“We already have one contract already in place to start providing the initial communications back from the moon,” Garcia Golan said. “We actually wanna expand that to provide navigation, pointing, clock timing and observation capabilities.”
The agency said future lunar missions would involve constellations of satellites providing communications, navigation and observation support for robotic and human operations.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman described the effort as part of a broader transformation in space exploration.
“We are moving with the competence and the purpose to accomplish the missions that only NASA is capable of achieving,” Isaacman said.
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