Trump’s NASA man has a new plan to take the U.S. to the moon

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman just announced a sweeping overhaul of America’s space strategy. Dubbed “Ignition,” it’s a tectonic shift in how the nation intends to conquer the moon. Isaacman, who took the agency’s helm in late 2025, laid out a hyper-accelerated road map to build a permanent lunar surface base before the end of President Donald J. Trump’s term. It is an aggressive departure from the agency’s previous trajectory, but looking at the unforgiving physics and glacial pace of actual aerospace engineering, the timeline reads like pure fantasy. 

The plan is great on paper, though. It lays out three deployment phases—which will progress from landing robots to building human habitats to establishing a permanent base crew. Isaacman says the plan positions the U.S. to compete with China, a country that is steadily advancing on its 100-year plan to build its own lunar base and set up a network of spaceships to control and exploit the resources in our satellite and the solar system. Isaacman is very aware of this. “The clock is running in this great-power competition, and success or failure will be measured in months, not years,” he stated in NASA’s official press release announcing the Ignition presentation event at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

But the history of space exploration is not actually written in months. Not even years. It’s written in decades. The hardware required for all the milestones that Ignition has set up is nowhere near ready, starting with the landers that will fly the humans from the moon’s orbit to its surface and back. According to a March 9 report from the NASA Office of Inspector General, the lifeblood of this lunar ambition—SpaceX’s colossal Starship lander—simply will not be prepared for a 2027 touchdown.

Nobody really knows when it will be ready, as Starship itself keeps exploding in midair from time to time. And the Space Launch System, the Boeing-built rocket that Isaacman criticized in the past, has been delayed again and again, given that it is plagued with problems. Every critical component of the supply chain is notoriously behind schedule, making the prospect of constructing a permanent extraterrestrial habitat before January 2029—the end of Trump’s presidency—less of a viable blueprint and more of an impossible dream.

Big change

The Ignition initiative starts with the immediate suspension of the Lunar Gateway, the planned space station that would have orbited the moon like a cosmic tollbooth. Following the previous plan, astronauts would arrive in a spaceship from Earth—like Lockheed Martin’s Orion—to dock and transfer to a lunar lander made by SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, designed specifically to just go up and down the moon’s surface.

With the new plan, instead of docking with the orbiting station, the lander will orbit the moon while waiting for Orion to arrive. The astronauts will move directly from Orion into the lunar lander—think about this spaceship as a reusable version of the Lunar Module that took the Apollo astronauts down to the surface—to go down, leaving Orion behind. Then, at the end of the mission, they will use the lander to go up, dock back with the Orion, and leave for Earth, leaving the lander orbiting for the next mission.

“It should not be much of a surprise that we intend to pause Gateway in its current form and focus on building lunar infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the surface,” Isaacman remarked at the Ignition presentation event, claiming that NASA aims to have landings every six months.

This abrupt pivot leaves a trail of whiplash and wasted hardware among America’s international allies, who had already invested heavily in the previous architecture. For years, the European Space Agency, Japan, and Canada poured funds and engineering hours into building modules for the now-mothballed Gateway station. Europe actually delivered its critical habitation module to NASA just last April, a massive metallic cylinder now left without a destination. The sudden policy apparently left ESA livid. An agency spokesperson told The Register that the agency “is consulting closely with its Member States, international partners, and European industry to assess the implications of the announcement, with further information to follow.” 

The agency will redirect the Lunar Gateway budget toward a three-phase lunar base built directly on the regolith. This permanent outpost begins with a $10 billion initial phase to deliver rovers and power generators, eventually scaling up to support continuous human habitation.

How NASA imagines it

Phase one of this ambitious settlement will happen in 2027. It relies entirely on a relentless barrage of private robotic landers. Instead of sending humans right away, NASA will bombard the lunar landscape with scientific instruments, uncrewed rovers, and advanced power systems like radioisotope thermoelectric generators (these are essentially rugged metal boxes that contain chunks of decaying plutonium that release continuous heat and electricity, an absolute necessity for machinery to survive the brutal, subfreezing lunar nights). 

Once that robotic foundation is laid, phase two will kick off in 2028 to support recurring astronaut visits. This will put more hardware on the surface, most notably a pressurized rover built by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency that will allow explorers to drive across the gray wasteland in a comfortable, shirt-sleeve environment rather than being trapped in bulky space suits.

Phase three will come in 2029. This is when the agency officially transitions from brief camping expeditions into a permanent, entrenched human foothold. To make this happen, NASA plans to use massive cargo variants of those currently delayed commercial landing systems to haul heavy infrastructure, like habitats, down to the surface. This is where the rest of the international partners come into play, bringing in monumental pieces of equipment such as the multipurpose habitats designed by the Italian Space Agency and a rugged lunar utility vehicle provided by Canada.

It is a grand vision of a bustling off-world colony, heavily dependent on all these colossal, unproven rockets magically maturing into reliable freight trains to the moon within the next couple of years.

Can it be done?

To execute this dizzying sprint, NASA is fundamentally restructuring its own workforce, stripping away layers of external contractors to hire engineers directly as civil servants and embedding federal experts directly into the factory floors of private vendors.

 Some observers seem to be quite excited. Veteran space journalist Mark Whittington, a firm supporter of the permanent lunar base idea, found Isaacman’s speech refreshing because it “acknowledges NASA’s shortcomings rather than minimizing or covering” the profound delays and wasted billions that plagued earlier iterations of the Artemis program.

As a child of Apollo, I’m a huge supporter of permanent lunar bases, too. But my enthusiasm cannot bend the harsh realities of physics, space development timelines, and congressional purse strings. The vision to build this is meaningless without the actual cash to buy the aluminum and fuel.

While a recent Senate committee advanced the 2026 NASA Authorization Act—which implicitly endorses this exact lunar base concept—that legislation does not actually allocate a single dime to the agency. As space policy analyst Marcia Smith bluntly pointed out to SpacePolicyOnline: “Authorization bills don’t provide any money; only appropriators do.” 

Even if the financial floodgates burst open tomorrow, the physics of keeping fragile human bodies alive in the lethal vacuum of space cannot be rushed by political mandates. The sobering March NASA OIG report explicitly commended NASA’s management but raised glaring alarms regarding crew safety on the commercial landers being developed by Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin. The watchdog discovered a terrifying blind spot in the current architecture: If a disaster strikes astronauts while walking on the lunar surface or orbiting above it, NASA possesses absolutely zero capability to mount a rescue mission. Rushing untested vehicles into the unforgiving environment of space without a safety net is a gamble that history shows often ends in tragedy.

We have watched this movie before, witnessing private lunar landers crash into the regolith and watching legacy and new aerospace giants stumble on engineering hurdles for years on end. Isaacman’s desire to cut the bureaucratic fat and focus the agency’s brilliant minds directly on the machinery is a deeply noble and refreshing shift in philosophy: NASA as a startup. Great. Beam me up.

But decreeing that a permanent lunar base and a nuclear-powered Martian flagship will materialize before 2029 ignores the brutal, unforgiving nature of orbital mechanics and the established cadence of human spaceflight. For all its good intentions and bold rhetoric, unless a hundred miracles happen, this sweeping new road map remains as profoundly tethered to fantasy as the heavily delayed plans it just replaced.