On May 26, 2026, NASA publicly updated its Moon Base plans and said the agency is pursuing a sustained presence on the lunar surface as part of Artemis, with the first phase centered on three uncrewed missions scheduled for 2026. The first mission, Moon Base I, is targeted for no earlier than fall 2026 using Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance lander to deliver NASA payloads to the Shackleton Connecting Ridge near the lunar south pole. Moon Base II is planned later in 2026 on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander with more than 1,100 pounds of cargo, and Moon Base III is also targeted for 2026 under NASA’s Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon initiative.
The technical signal is that NASA is shifting from concept to infrastructure pre-deployment: south-polar landing sites, precision cargo delivery, mobility systems, rovers, and surface-science payloads are now being treated as enabling layers for later crewed operations. NASA also framed the program in three phases, with Phase One running through 2029 to secure reliable surface access, Phase Two from 2029 to 2032 to establish initial operating capability, and Phase Three beyond 2032 to support semi-permanent crew presence. For the Ark, this confirms the south pole as the highest-value lunar logistics node, especially because water-ice access, power continuity, and terrain knowledge are decisive for long-duration settlement.
Ark priority is to track the specific hardware, landing corridors, power systems, and mobility technologies being tested by these missions, because they will define the baseline for any durable lunar survival stack. The team should map how NASA’s cargo architecture, rover maturation, and surface-navigation programs can be repurposed for archive deployment, emergency sheltering, cryogenic storage, and redundant resupply. The highest-value integration targets are the south-polar landing site data, the Moon Base phase schedule, and the performance of Blue Origin, Astrobotic, and NASA’s mobility payloads under real lunar conditions.