On March 24, executives from across the space industry and officials from dozens of countries filed into NASA’s Washington headquarters, unsure what they had been called to hear.
The agency had announced the event — dubbed “Ignition” — only a day earlier, offering few details beyond a vague promise to discuss the implementation of a White House space directive.
Over roughly seven hours, agency leaders announced new programs, including a lunar base and nuclear-propelled Mars mission, while effectively canceling the lunar Gateway and proposing major changes to the support for commercial space stations.
What the audience witnessed was the biggest shakeup in NASA’s exploration plans since the first Trump administration announced a human return to the moon in 2017.
The changes, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said, were needed to inject urgency as it faces a “real geopolitical rival challenging American leadership in the high ground of space,” a reference to China’s plans to land humans on the moon by the end of the decade.
“This is why it is imperative we leave an event like Ignition with complete alignment on the national imperative that is our collective vision,” he said. “We are long past the time of words and PowerPoints.”
The stars align for a moon base
Did NASA achieve that complete alignment? One area where it at least came close was the centerpiece of the event: the development of a lunar base. At Ignition, NASA outlined a three-phase program spanning a decade to establish a lunar base and all the infrastructure, from communications to power, needed to support it.
“There are moments in history when all the stars align to enable us to do something great, and I believe our moment is now,” said Carlos Garcia-Galan, whose official title is program executive for Moon Base at NASA but was dubbed “lunar viceroy” by Isaacman at Ignition and sometimes refers to himself simply as the “moon base guy.”
Speaking at the 41st Space Symposium a couple weeks after Ignition, he reviewed a three-phase strategy that would start with a sharp increase in robotic lander missions and work on enabling technologies, before starting to build the base in the second phase and expand its capabilities in the third.
Doing so, he acknowledged, will require a full-court press by industry. “We’re going to have to basically change our recent experience with the number of missions,” he said. “We know we’re going to stress the supply chain.”
That surge of missions and the funding projected to support them — NASA expects to spend $10 billion on each of the first two phases and at least $10 billion on the third — has the industry’s attention and support.
“We are putting the full force of SpaceX to attacking this problem because we are inspired by the vision of the administration and of NASA for the moon,” said Nick Cummings, a senior director at SpaceX, during a panel that followed Garcia-Galan at Space Symposium.
He said SpaceX’s focus was on transportation. “We need to at least be able to transport things and people to the moon as regularly, reliably and affordably as we do for the space station today,” he said, enabling the other capabilities needed for a base.
“I’m partial to communications and positioning, navigation and timing,” said Tim Crain, chief technology officer at Intuitive Machines. His company is working on a constellation of satellites that would provide those services around the moon. “Communications and PNT enables you to use your time effectively. That’s going to be critical.”
While Blue Origin is working on its own lunar lander capabilities, the company is also pursuing technologies for in situ resource utilization, or ISRU, that it thinks will be vital for a sustainable lunar base.
“ISRU gets a bad rap sometimes because it seems so far in the future,” said Jacki Cortese, vice president of civil space at Blue Origin.
The company has nearly 100 people working on ISRU technologies, including a payload that can extract oxygen from lunar regolith that could fly as part of the first phase of the base. “It’s not this long-term, far-future thing.”
Other companies are looking for roles they could play in the lunar base. “We’ve been working on inflatable habitats for a while,” said Robert Lightfoot, president of Lockheed Martin Space, in an interview during the conference. “We think that is a potential option for lunar infrastructure.”
With the limited details about NASA’s lunar base plans, companies for now see plenty of opportunities to take part. “It would be absolutely epic if we’re going to the moon with people and robots so often that it’s not this massive deal every time we go,” Cortese said.
Powering up nuclear propulsion
Another new exploration project announced at the event, a nuclear electric propulsion mission named Space Reactor 1 (SR-1) Freedom, would launch in late 2028, using a 20-kilowatt nuclear reactor to power an electric propulsion system that was originally developed for the Gateway to send the spacecraft to Mars.
SR-1 represents a redirection of NASA’s Fission Surface Power project announced last year, which sought to place a reactor on the moon as part of an industry partnership.
“We realized that when we went out and said, ‘Industry, you do it all,’ that was a big ask,” Steve Sinacore, program executive for Fission Surface Power at NASA, said in an interview.
Under the new effort, NASA will develop the reactor in-house, sharing the designs with industry. “This really is a NASA near-impossible thing. Let’s trailblaze, let’s be the pathfinder, and then hand off to them,” he said.
The plan is that, after SR-1, NASA will turn to industry to produce larger reactors for both in-space propulsion and providing power on the moon. That aligns with a space nuclear policy directive issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy April 14, which called on NASA to start with a 20-kilowatt reactor ready by 2028 that could be scaled up to systems that can produce 100 kilowatts or more.
As with the lunar base, companies welcomed the opportunity to work with NASA on space nuclear power. “I’m really excited about nuclear electric propulsion and SR-1 Freedom,” said Kristin Houston, president of space propulsion and power systems at L3Harris, during a media roundtable at Space Symposium.
Flying SR-1 by the end of 2028 is feasible, she said, using existing components. “We really just need to prove we can just go do it, and then it’ll open the door for more.”
Lightfoot noted Lockheed has worked on some recent space nuclear projects, such as the joint NASA/DARPA DRACO mission that would have tested nuclear thermal propulsion in orbit. DARPA canceled the project last year.
“We’ve been spending a lot of our own internal money to do work on that,” he said. “We think there’s an opportunity there, depending on what NASA actually asks for.”
Space station criticism
NASA also announced at the event it was considering a major revamp to its Commercial LEO Destinations program, concerned that markets for commercial stations were not emerging. NASA proposed instead to help incubate development of commercial stations by building a government-owned “core module” that would be added to the International Space Station, to which commercial modules could be installed as precursors to full-fledged stations.
Companies planning commercial space stations did not welcome the proposed change. “We were obviously very surprised at the announcement,” Max Haot, chief executive of Vast, said in an interview.
NASA issued a request for information seeking input on its proposal and what data the companies had about the market for commercial stations, with responses due just before the start of Space Symposium.
“The RFI said, ‘Show us your evidence,’” said Marshall Smith, chief executive of Starlab Space, on a conference panel. “We put in 390 pages of independent analysis, research studies, data, contracts, those types of things.”
He and other executives with commercial space station companies said they believed there were markets for their stations, particularly from governments: “Sovereign nations wanting to fly their astronauts, get them trained, get them prepared for a role in Artemis,” said Jonathan Cirtain, chief executive of Axiom Space. “That is a market. There is revenue there.”
Haot said he believed there was sufficient demand from NASA and the other Western ISS partners to support two stations, supplemented by demand from other nations wanting to fly their astronauts. “With that alone, and with zero dollars from in-space manufacturing, sponsorship and tourism, Vast can be profitable,” he said.
He hoped that NASA will rethink changing the CLD program after reviewing the responses to the request for information. “We believe that logic and reason will prevail.”
International uncertainty
NASA said that dozens of countries attended Ignition despite the short notice provided by the agency. Some, though, came away from the event less than happy about what NASA proposed.
That includes Canada, Europe and Japan, the major partners with NASA on the Gateway. At Ignition, NASA said it would “pause” development of that lunar-orbiting facility indefinitely to focus on the lunar base.
“While that is still relevant for future exploration goals, it is not required to accomplish our primary objectives,” Garcia-Galan said of Gateway at the event.
Much of Gateway would come from international partners, including a Canadian robotic arm and modules developed by Europe and Japan. Those countries’ space agencies, already developing the Gateway components, were left wondering how they might repurpose work already done on those elements for a lunar base.
“We are reconsidering and reassessing our investments that we have made in the Gateway to see what can be used on the surface and what can be redirected for other purposes,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, said at an April 1 briefing.
That analysis was ongoing, he noted, as they examined how much work had been done on ESA’s elements of the Gateway and how it might be redirected. He said his goal was to have a plan ready to present to ESA’s members at a council meeting in mid-June. ESA is also planning a meeting at the ministerial level, potentially later this year, to discuss changes in the agency’s exploration plans.
He had few firm answers, though, including what would happen to the three seats ESA secured on future Gateway missions for its astronauts. “Discussions will focus on astronauts on the surface,” he said of future talks with NASA.
Another partner on the Gateway was the United Arab Emirates, which agreed in 2024 to provide an airlock module. However, it appeared more open to the changes announced by NASA.
“There are multiple opportunities that we’re looking at,” said Salem Humaid Al Marri, director general of the UAE’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, at the Meridian International Center’s Space Diplomacy Forum the day after the Ignition event.
“One thing the UAE does quite well is that we can pivot,” he said. “That’s what we’ll be doing over the next couple of months to see where we can contribute actively in this overall system, with the dream that we would like to have Emirati astronauts on the surface of the moon.”
This article first appeared in the May 2026 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
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