NASA's moon base plans include landers, buggies and drones for 2028 mission

Space NASA's moon base plans include landers, buggies and drones for 2028 mission May 26, 2026 / 6:27 PM EDT / CBS/AP Add CBS News on Google NASA is already ordering landers, rovers and drones for a sprawling moon base, less than two months after the Artemis II's record-breaking lunar flyaround.The space agency outlined the first phase of its moon base plans on Tuesday, awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to four U.S. companies.Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin will provide a pair of landers to deliver moon buggies to the lunar surface, at a spot near the moon's south pole. These so-called lunar terrain vehicles will be built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost. Firefly Aerospace, which landed successfully on the moon last year, will deliver the first drones to the moon. This rendering shows Astrolab's CLV-1 rover on the lunar surface. NASA selected Astrolab as one of two providers of a crewed lunar rover for the Artemis program. Astrolab/ via AP photos All this hardware is ideally supposed to arrive before the first Artemis astronauts land on the moon, planned for as early as 2028.During April's Artemis II mission, four astronauts flew around the moon, traveling deeper into space than the Apollo moon crews did during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For next year's Artemis III, another team of astronauts will practice docking NASA's Orion capsule in orbit around Earth with the lunar landers being developed for crews by Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX.The Artemis III test flight with one or two lander dockings in Earth orbit is similar in concept to Apollo 9, which launched a command module and lander to Earth orbit for flight tests in 1969 and helped pave the way to the Apollo 11 landing four months later.NASA is targeting Artemis III for mid-2027, with a landing by two astronauts following as soon as 2028. The moon base's second phase, from 2029 into the early 2030s, will start building up the permanent infrastructure, includ...