Beyond the Horizon
The images of astronauts on the Moon, broadcast a generation ago, represented a singular achievement, a destination reached. Today, NASA’s ambitions have shifted from planting flags to building outposts. The agency’s current Moon-to-Mars strategy, with the Artemis program as its visible vanguard, is not merely a sequel to Apollo. It is a fundamentally different endeavor, conceived from the ground up as a sprawling, multi-decade technology development campaign. Its ultimate purpose is to systematically dismantle the single greatest barrier to a permanent human presence in deep space: the tyranny of a terrestrial supply chain. Every mission, every piece of hardware, and every research dollar is aimed at solving the significant challenge of learning to live and work sustainably, far from Earth.
This grand strategy is built upon four foundational pillars, or strategic thrusts, that logically address the entire lifecycle of an off-world mission: Go, Land, Live, and Explore. “Go” encompasses the technologies needed for rapid and efficient transportation through space. “Land” focuses on mastering the perilous challenge of arriving safely at diverse planetary surfaces. “Live” is the ambitious effort to create sustainable habitats and infrastructure, learning to “live off the land” by harnessing local resources. Finally, “Explore” represents the cross-cutting digital and robotic “nervous system”—the advanced computing, communication, and manufacturing technologies that enable all other operations.
The Artemis missions serve as the operational testbed for this technological blueprint. The initial flights are not ends in themselves but are carefully designed steps to validate the rockets, spacecraft, life support systems, and operational concepts required for a sustained lunar presence. This approach marks a deliberate departure from the Apollo paradigm, which was predicated on short sorties with all supplies carried from Earth. The new model is one of persistence, where future explorers can work for extended periods by leveraging local materials—a concept central to NASA’s Moon to Mars Objectives, which call for systems designed for maintainability and reuse and the demonstrated use of in-situ resources to reduce the mass that must be launched from home.
Looking closely at the architecture of this plan reveals a deeper strategic purpose. The entire technological framework is designed with a “dual-use” philosophy. The challenges of living and working on the Moon—its vacuum, extreme temperatures, and abrasive dust—make it an unparalleled training ground. Nearly every system required for a sustainable lunar base is a direct, scalable precursor to what will be needed for an even more ambitious human presence on Mars. The repeated references in NASA’s planning documents to technology needs for “L, T, M” (Lunar, Transit, Mars) are not coincidental; they reflect a direct and deliberate linkage in the agency’s strategic thinking.
This is most evident in the strategy for In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), which explicitly details a “Moon to Mars Forward” approach. The processes for extracting oxygen from lunar rock and mining water ice from shadowed craters are direct operational and engineering analogs for processing the carbon dioxide-rich Martian atmosphere and mining its subsurface water ice. The production targets for a lunar base are stepping stones, designed to prove the technology and operations before committing to the much larger quantities needed to produce propellant for a Mars Ascent Vehicle. Similarly, the capabilities for autonomous construction on the Moon are explicitly described as being “extensible to future… Mars missions”. Building a lunar landing pad is practice for building one on Mars.
This integrated approach reframes the entire Artemis program. The Moon is not just a destination; it is an essential, high-fidelity engineering and operational proving ground. The massive investment in lunar infrastructure finds its ultimate justification in its role as a dress rehearsal for Mars, a place to retire enormous technical and operational risks before humanity takes its next, much longer stride into the solar system. It transforms a series of seemingly disconnected missions into a single, coherent, long-term campaign to make humanity a multi-planet species.
Go: Forging New Pathways in Space Transportation
For more than sixty years, human space exploration has been tethered to the limits of chemical rocketry. While powerful, these engines are fundamentally inefficient for the vast distances of interplanetary travel. A crewed mission to Mars using conventional propulsion would take six to nine months each way, exposing astronauts to prolonged periods of deep-space radiation and the debilitating effects of weightlessness. To break these constraints and enable a new era of rapid and efficient deep space transit, NASA is investing in a portfolio of advanced propulsion and fluid management technologies designed to create new pathways through the solar system.
Advanced Propulsion Systems
The future of in-space transportation will not be dominated by a single engine type but by a diverse set of specialized systems, each optimized for a specific task. The primary trade-off in rocketry is between thrust (the force that provides acceleration) and specific impulse, or Isp (a measure of fuel efficiency). High-thrust engines provide rapid acceleration, necessary for escaping a planet’s gravity, but are fuel-hungry. High-efficiency engines sip propellant, allowing for massive changes in velocity over time, but produce very low thrust. NASA’s strategy involves developing technologies across this entire spectrum.
At the high-thrust end of the scale is Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP). In an NTP engine, a compact nuclear reactor heats a propellant, typically liquid hydrogen, to extreme temperatures and expels it through a nozzle to generate thrust. Because the hydrogen can be heated to a much higher temperature than is possible through chemical combustion, NTP systems achieve a specific impulse of 900 seconds or more—roughly double the efficiency of the best chemical engines, like the Space Shuttle’s main engines which had an Isp of around 450 seconds. This combination of high thrust and high efficiency makes NTP the leading candidate for crewed Mars missions. It could cut the transit time to Mars to as little as three to four months, significantly reducing the crew’s exposure to the hazards of deep space.
On the other end of the spectrum are Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) and Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP) systems. These are ultra-efficient, low-thrust engines. Instead of using heat, they use electrical power—generated either by large solar arrays (SEP) or a nuclear reactor (NEP)—to accelerate ions or plasma to extremely high speeds, achieving specific impulses thousands of seconds long. While their thrust is very gentle, often compared to the pressure of a piece of paper resting on your hand, they can operate continuously for months or years. Over time, this gentle but persistent push can produce enormous changes in velocity, making them ideal for hauling massive amounts of cargo.
NASA’s development plan for electric propulsion is tiered. It begins with the 12.5-kilowatt class Hall effect thruster systems being built for the lunar Gateway, which will use SEP to maintain its orbit and maneuver in cislunar space. The next step involves more powerful 7 to 14-kilowatt gridded ion thrusters for ambitious robotic science missions. The ultimate goal is to develop multi-hundred-kilowatt and eventually megawatt-class NEP systems for the robotic cargo freighters that would pre-deploy habitats, vehicles, and supplies to Mars ahead of a human crew.
Even as these advanced systems mature, there remains a vital role for Advanced Chemical Propulsion. Technologies like Rotating Detonation Rocket Engines (RDREs) promise to increase the efficiency of conventional chemical propellants by up to 25%. By using a continuous detonation wave to combust propellants rather than a slower deflagration, these engines could provide a significant performance boost for applications where high thrust is non-negotiable, such as planetary landers and ascent vehicles.
The development of these varied propulsion systems is not an academic exercise; it is directly coupled to the agency’s architectural planning. The choice of a propulsion system is fundamentally linked to the availability of advanced space power systems. The ambitious megawatt-class NEP systems envisioned for Mars cargo missions are entirely dependent on the parallel development of compact, high-power space nuclear reactors. The same fission power technology being developed under the Fission Surface Power project to provide tens of kilowatts of electricity for a lunar base is a direct technological stepping stone to the space-rated reactors needed for NEP. An investment in surface power directly benefits deep-space transportation, revealing a deep synergy between the “Go” and “Live” strategic thrusts. This makes the development of space fission reactors a keystone technology, enabling both sustainable habitats on the Moon and rapid transit throughout the solar system.
The Interplanetary Gas Station: Cryogenic Fluid Management
Advanced propulsion engines are useless without the ability to store, manage, and transfer their propellants in space. For high-performance systems that use cryogenics like liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, and liquid methane, this is a formidable challenge. In the warmth of sunlight, these super-chilled liquids will quickly boil away, and in the zero-gravity environment of space, they behave in non-intuitive ways, making them difficult to pump from one tank to another. Cryogenic Fluid Management (CFM) is the foundational technology set required to solve these problems and enable the in-space refueling depots and “gas stations” that are essential for a sustainable transportation architecture.
The central goal of CFM is to achieve near-zero boil-off storage for extended periods. This requires a multi-layered approach to thermal control. It starts with high-performance Multi-Layer Insulation (MLI), which acts like a sophisticated thermos bottle to block incoming heat. This is often supplemented with actively cooled shields and low-conductivity structures to intercept and reject heat before it can reach the propellant tanks. For very long missions, active refrigeration systems, known as cryocoolers, are required to constantly remove the small amount of heat that inevitably leaks in, achieving a state of thermal equilibrium where no propellant is lost. NASA is developing high-efficiency cryocoolers capable of operating at the very low temperatures required for liquid hydrogen (20 K) and liquid oxygen/methane (90 K).
Equally important is the ability to transfer these cryogenic fluids from a depot tank to a vehicle tank with minimal loss. The goal is to limit propellant losses during transfer to 1% or less, leaving less than 1% of residual propellant in the supply tank. This requires a suite of specialized hardware, including highly efficient pumps designed to work with fluids that can easily flash into gas, automated cryogenic couplers that can form a perfect seal in space, and low-leakage valves. It also requires sophisticated sensors to gauge the mass of unsettled liquid in a tank and models to predict the complex thermal and fluid dynamics of the process.
Because the behavior of cryogenic fluids in microgravity cannot be perfectly replicated in ground-based facilities, in-space demonstrations are absolutely essential. NASA is pursuing a strategy of near-term flight demonstrations, often through partnerships with commercial companies via Tipping Point awards, to mature these technologies in the relevant environment. These smaller-scale experiments will provide the crucial data needed to validate predictive models and design the large, integrated flight demonstrations that will prove the full-scale storage and transfer systems needed for future missions to the Moon and Mars.
Land: Mastering Planetary Arrivals and Departures
Arriving at another world is one of the most complex and dangerous phases of any space mission. A spacecraft hurtling through space at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour must shed nearly all of its velocity in a matter of minutes, surviving a fiery atmospheric entry before descending to a safe touchdown. As mission payloads grow larger and landing sites become more scientifically interesting—and often more hazardous—the challenge of Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) grows exponentially. NASA’s strategy is to move beyond the ballistic, semi-controlled landings of the past and master the technologies for actively guided atmospheric flight and pinpoint landing.
The Science of a Safe Arrival
The physics of hypersonic atmospheric entry are so complex that they cannot be fully tested on Earth. No wind tunnel can simultaneously replicate the scale, velocity, temperature, and atmospheric chemistry a spacecraft experiences. Consequently, NASA relies heavily on advanced Modeling and Simulation (M&S) to design, test, and certify EDL systems for flight. A key priority is to develop and validate higher-fidelity computational models to reduce the large uncertainties that currently exist in areas like aerothermodynamics (the intense heating a vehicle endures), parachute inflation dynamics, and the response of thermal protection materials. Reducing these uncertainties allows engineers to design lighter, more efficient systems with smaller safety margins, which in turn frees up mass for more scientific instruments or other mission-critical hardware.
This modeling effort goes hand-in-hand with the development of next-generation EDL hardware. For missions like the Mars Sample Return Lander, which will be the heaviest payload ever sent to the Red Planet, NASA is developing the largest supersonic parachute ever flown. For even more extreme entries, such as a probe destined for Venus or the gas giants, the agency is maturing advanced Thermal Protection Systems (TPS). These include 3D woven materials like the Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) and 3D-Mid-Density Carbon Phenolic (3MDCP), which are designed to withstand the incredibly high heating rates and loads of high-speed entries into dense atmospheres. For landing very large payloads, beyond the capability of parachutes, NASA is developing deployable decelerators like the Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD), a kind of inflatable heat shield that can dramatically increase a vehicle’s drag.
One of the most promising EDL technologies is aerocapture. This technique allows a spacecraft arriving at a planet with an atmosphere, such as Neptune or Uranus, to use a single, carefully guided pass through the upper atmosphere to brake into orbit, rather than carrying and firing a massive rocket engine. Aerocapture could drastically reduce the required propellant mass for outer planet orbiters, which in turn could shorten trip times or allow for the inclusion of additional science instruments or atmospheric probes. While it has never been performed, it leverages guidance and control methods demonstrated during the Apollo, Orion, and Mars rover missions. A key step to enabling this capability is an Earth-based flight demonstration to mature the technology and reduce the perceived risk for a flagship science mission.
Precision Landing and Hazard Avoidance
Early planetary landers arrived within landing ellipses that were tens or even hundreds of kilometers wide. For future missions focused on building infrastructure or exploring specific geological features, this level of inaccuracy is unacceptable. The goal is to land within 50 meters of a designated target and to autonomously avoid hazards like large rocks, steep slopes, or deep craters during the final moments of descent.
This capability is enabled by a suite of sensors and intelligent software. Systems like Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN), first demonstrated on the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, allow a lander to become an active participant in its own landing. During descent, an onboard camera takes rapid pictures of the ground. The lander’s computer compares these images to a pre-loaded orbital map of the landing area to determine its precise location. It can then identify any hazards within its reach and fire its descent engines to divert to a pre-selected or newly identified safe landing spot. Future systems will incorporate advanced sensors like LIDAR to build a real-time 3D map of the terrain, further enhancing the lander’s ability to navigate to a safe and precise touchdown.
The evolution from the pre-programmed landing sequences of missions like Viking to the active, sense-and-react capabilities of modern landers reveals a fundamental shift in the nature of EDL. It is no longer a passive, pre-determined series of events. It has become a real-time autonomous robotics problem. The lander is, in effect, a short-lived, highly specialized robot that must perceive its environment, process that information, and act upon it in a fraction of a second, all without any human intervention. This tight coupling of EDL with robotics and artificial intelligence shows how technologies developed under the “Explore” thrust, such as high-performance, radiation-tolerant computers and advanced AI algorithms, are direct enablers for the “Land” thrust. The need to perform these complex, time-critical calculations during the final phase of landing is a powerful driver for continued advancements in spaceborne autonomous systems.
Live: Building a Sustainable Existence Far from Earth
The most ambitious part of NASA’s vision is the transition from short-term exploration to long-term habitation. This requires creating a self-sufficient outpost, a closed ecosystem where humans can live and work for months or years with minimal reliance on supplies from Earth. This “Live” thrust is an interconnected web of technologies encompassing life support, resource extraction, and large-scale construction, all designed to enable humans to thrive on the Moon and, eventually, Mars.
The Closed-Loop Home: Advanced Habitation Systems
A crewed habitat in deep space must be a self-contained biosphere, recycling air, water, and waste with near-perfect efficiency. The current systems on the International Space Station (ISS) are a starting point, but they are only partially closed-loop and require frequent resupply and maintenance. For missions to Mars, where resupply is impractical, a much higher degree of closure is needed. The goal for Advanced Habitation Systems (AHS) is to develop Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS) that can recover over 98% of the water from wastewater and humidity and over 75% of the oxygen from the carbon dioxide exhaled by the crew. Achieving these targets would drastically reduce the launch mass of a long-duration mission by minimizing the need to carry water and oxygen from Earth.
Beyond basic life support, AHS also encompasses the full suite of systems needed to keep astronauts healthy and productive. This includes robust radiation protection, with advanced detectors and shielding materials, as well as improved space weather forecasting to provide 24-hour advance warning of dangerous solar storms. It involves developing compact, effective exercise equipment and other countermeasures to mitigate the physiological effects of microgravity and reduced gravity on the human body, such as bone density loss and muscle atrophy. A critical need is for autonomous medical care, including in-mission diagnostic tools and AI-driven decision support systems that can help a crew manage medical issues without real-time guidance from Earth, which is impossible given the communication delays to Mars.
Finally, a sustainable presence requires a new approach to food and nutrition. While the pre-packaged food system is adequate for shorter missions, long-duration stays on the Moon or Mars will benefit from the ability to grow fresh food. This not only provides essential nutrients that can degrade over time in packaged food but also offers significant psychological benefits to the crew. NASA is developing systems for in-space agriculture and aiming for food systems with a shelf life of over five years and high acceptability among the crew.
Living Off the Land: In-Situ Resource Utilization
The key to breaking our dependence on Earth is In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU)—the ability to find, extract, and process local materials into useful products. On the Moon and Mars, the most valuable resources are water ice and oxygen locked within minerals.
The ISRU process follows a complete “prospect to product” pipeline. It begins with reconnaissance and prospecting, using orbital instruments and surface rovers to map the location and concentration of resources like water ice, which is believed to exist in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles. Once a promising site is identified, the next step is acquisition. This involves robotic systems for excavating icy regolith or mining oxygen-bearing minerals from the soil. Finally, the raw material enters a processing plant, where chemical and thermal processes are used to extract the desired products.
On the Moon, the primary ISRU targets are water and oxygen. Water can be extracted from icy regolith by heating it, capturing the resulting vapor, and condensing it back into liquid. This water can then be used for life support, radiation shielding, or split via electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen to create powerful rocket propellant. Oxygen, which makes up over 40% of the lunar regolith by mass, can be extracted directly from minerals through various high-temperature chemical processes like molten regolith electrolysis or carbothermal reduction. This oxygen can be used for life support or as an oxidizer for rocket engines, with the remaining metals and slag potentially serving as feedstock for manufacturing and construction.
The scale of these ambitions is industrial. The initial goal is to produce tens of metric tons of commodities per year, eventually scaling up to hundreds or thousands of tons to support a permanent human settlement and a commercial transportation market in cislunar space.
Building a Lunar Base: Excavation, Construction, and Outfitting
With access to locally sourced materials from ISRU, it becomes possible to engage in large-scale Excavation, Construction, and Outfitting (ECO) to build the infrastructure needed for a permanent base. This process begins with robotic site preparation. Just like on Earth, any construction project requires a prepared foundation. Autonomous rovers equipped with blades, buckets, and compactors will clear rocks, level terrain, and grade surfaces for landing pads and habitats.
The construction itself will evolve through three distinct phases, or classes. Class I construction is the simplest approach, involving the delivery of pre-integrated, Earth-manufactured modules that are ready for immediate habitation, similar to how the ISS was built. Class II involves surface deployment and assembly. This could include deploying inflatable habitats to create large pressurized volumes or assembling structures like towers and shelters from pre-fabricated truss elements. These elements could be brought from Earth or, eventually, manufactured on the Moon using ISRU-derived metals. The most advanced phase is Class III construction, which involves manufacturing structures in-situ, primarily through additive manufacturing (3D printing). In this scenario, large robotic printers would use processed lunar regolith as a primary feedstock to print landing pads, roads, radiation shields, and even habitats, layer by layer.
The specific infrastructure targets for ECO are directly tied to enabling a sustainable presence. Landing pads are needed to mitigate the hazardous spray of high-velocity dust kicked up by rocket exhaust. Roads will allow for efficient transportation between different parts of the base. Habitats and shelters, potentially covered with a thick layer of regolith for radiation shielding, will protect the crew. And tall towers will be needed to host solar arrays for power generation and antennas for communication.
The combination of ISRU and ECO technologies represents more than just a way to support NASA missions; it forms the foundational industrial layer of a potential lunar economy. The repeated use of terms like “commodities” and enabling a “vibrant space economy” in NASA’s strategic documents is telling. The plans for “Commercial ECO Capabilities” and industrial-scale production targets point to a vision that extends beyond the agency’s direct needs. NASA is effectively acting as the anchor tenant, investing in the high-risk technology development and demonstrating the core industrial processes of mining, refining, and construction. The long-term objective is to create a self-sustaining market where commercial companies can take over these operations, selling propellant, water, and oxygen to NASA, other national space agencies, and private ventures. This would transform the Moon from a remote scientific outpost into a bustling economic node, a vital part of a permanent human presence in the solar system.
Explore: The Nervous System of Deep Space Operations
The ambitious goals of getting to, landing on, and living on other worlds are all underpinned by a suite of pervasive, cross-cutting technologies that form the digital and robotic infrastructure of exploration. This “Explore” thrust encompasses the advanced communications, computing, robotics, and manufacturing systems that act as the intelligent nervous system for all deep space operations. These are the technologies that will allow future missions to operate with unprecedented levels of autonomy, capability, and flexibility.
Advanced Communications and Navigation
As human and robotic operations expand across the lunar surface and eventually to Mars, the current model of point-to-point communication with Earth becomes unsustainable. The solution is LunaNet, a concept for a dedicated communications and navigation network at the Moon. Analogous to a combination of the internet and the Global Positioning System (GPS) on Earth, LunaNet would consist of a framework of interoperable relay satellites in lunar orbit and navigation beacons on the surface. This network would provide continuous, high-bandwidth data links and precise, real-time position, navigation, and timing (PNT) services to all assets on and around the Moon, from astronauts on EVA to autonomous rovers and landers.
A key enabler of this high-bandwidth future is the transition from radio frequency (RF) systems to optical (laser) communications. By transmitting data on beams of light rather than radio waves, optical systems can achieve data rates that are orders of magnitude higher. NASA’s goals include developing systems capable of transmitting data at multiple gigabits per second from the lunar surface and eventually hundreds of gigabits per second from near-Earth orbits. This capability is essential for supporting a permanent human presence, enabling applications like high-definition video streaming, large-scale scientific data return, and remote operation of complex robotic systems.
Advanced Avionics and Computing
The brain of any modern spacecraft is its avionics and computing system. For future missions that demand high levels of autonomy, these systems must become vastly more powerful. NASA is developing a new generation of High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) that is not only powerful but also hardened to withstand the harsh radiation environment of deep space. This provides the raw computational horsepower needed to run the complex algorithms for autonomous navigation, robotic manipulation, and real-time data analysis.
This advanced hardware will be paired with specialized processors designed to accelerate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) workloads. These AI coprocessors will be essential for tasks like autonomous landing, where a spacecraft must process imagery and make split-second decisions to avoid hazards, or for robotic servicing, where a robot must identify components and perform intricate manipulations. By moving this processing capability from ground controllers on Earth to the spacecraft itself, NASA can overcome the limitations imposed by the long communication delays, particularly for missions to Mars.
A New Industrial Revolution in Space
The “Explore” thrust also encompasses a revolutionary shift in how space hardware is built, maintained, and utilized, through In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM). This represents a move away from the traditional model of launching large, monolithic, and essentially disposable spacecraft. The new paradigm is one where systems are designed to be modular, repairable, and upgradable from the start.
In-space servicing will involve robotic servicers that can autonomously rendezvous with and capture other spacecraft to perform tasks like refueling, repairing or replacing failed components, and installing new instruments. This capability could dramatically extend the operational lifetimes of valuable assets, from commercial communication satellites to flagship science observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope.
In-space assembly will make it possible to construct structures in orbit that are far too large to fit inside the fairing of any existing rocket. The next generation of giant space telescopes, for instance, may be launched in pieces and assembled in space by robotic systems, enabling unprecedented scientific discoveries.
This is complemented by Advanced Manufacturing technologies, both on the ground and in space. On Earth, techniques like 3D printing of complex rocket engine components, the use of lightweight composite materials, and the creation of “digital twins” for predictive modeling are already making space hardware cheaper to build and more capable. In space, additive manufacturing is the key technology that will enable on-demand fabrication of spare parts, tools, and eventually entire structures, using feedstock derived from local resources via ISRU.
The convergence of these “Explore” technologies points toward an inevitable future of distributed autonomy. The combination of significant communication delays, the complexity of managing dozens of robotic and human systems simultaneously across a planetary surface, and the sheer volume of data being generated makes centralized, Earth-based mission control impractical for a sustained presence on Mars. The architecture NASA is developing—with its autonomous communication routing, space cloud computing, and cooperative robotic operations—describes an ecosystem of intelligent systems. In this future, a habitat’s central computer could offload a complex analysis to a nearby rover, which navigates using a local network of surface beacons, while a servicing robot autonomously decides to perform a repair on a power station, all without direct, real-time commands from Houston. This collaborative, self-managing network of systems is the technological and operational end-state that the entire “Explore” thrust is designed to achieve.
Summary
NASA’s technological blueprint for the next era of space exploration is a comprehensive and deeply interconnected strategy. It is not a wish list of futuristic gadgets but an integrated portfolio of capabilities where progress in one area enables and is dependent upon progress in others. The success of the “Go” thrust, with its advanced propulsion systems, depends on the “Live” thrust to provide propellant from in-situ resources, breaking the need to launch all fuel from Earth. The success of the “Live” thrust, with its ambitious construction and resource utilization plans, depends on the “Land” thrust to deliver heavy equipment with pinpoint accuracy, and on the “Explore” thrust to provide the robotics, autonomy, and computing to build and operate the outpost.
This strategic framework represents a pragmatic, step-by-step plan to achieve a goal that has long been the stuff of science fiction: a permanent, economically vibrant human presence beyond Earth. The Artemis program and the return to the Moon are the critical first steps in this grand endeavor. The Moon is not the final destination but the essential engineering proving ground, the high-fidelity testbed where NASA will master the technologies and operational concepts needed to take the next, far more challenging leap in our collective human journey to Mars.
