NASA is undergoing a major transformation under new leadership, and the ambitions coming from the agency sound almost unbelievable. Jared Isaacman, the new administrator of NASA who came to the head of the agency with rich experience as an astronaut and the founder of Shift4 Payments, announced on March 17, 2026 in an interview for SpaceFlight Now a plan that, if implemented, would completely change the dynamics of lunar exploration.
Isaacman revealed an ambitious plan to land missions on the moon once a month during 2027. Regular missions will be aimed at building a lunar base on the surface of the Moon, which will serve as a laboratory where astronauts can develop ways to live beyond Earth’s orbit. He summed up his reasoning in one sentence: if you’re building a lunar base and you’re going to stay there, you’re going to need a lot of missions to the moon and back.
The upcoming missions will be part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which is a key element of the Artemis program. Under contracts worth $2.6 billion, various companies are tasked with developing payloads and carrying out lunar landings by 2028. Isaacman specified that he wants to land on the moon’s south pole starting in early 2027, citing as priorities the construction of navigation and communication infrastructure, energy generation equipment including nuclear energy and propulsion.
There is also a political directive behind it. In a recent executive order, the White House directed NASA to establish the initial elements of a permanent lunar base by 2030, the purpose of which is to develop a long-term and sustainable presence of astronauts on the lunar surface to enable deep space exploration to distant destinations such as Mars.
As for the revised Artemis plan, NASA now plans to attempt to land astronauts on the moon in 2028, possibly twice in the same year for the Artemis 4 and 5 missions. The accelerated pace of flights is directly related to preparing the lunar surface for an influx of visitors. Artemis 2, the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft and SLS rocket, is scheduled for launch in April of this year.
However, ambition and feasibility are not the same thing. So far, four CLPS missions have been launched towards the Moon, and three have managed to land on the lunar surface in the last two years. Landing on the moon is no easy task, and private companies will have to ramp up production significantly to keep up with updated Artemis plans. The planned moon landings would be an unprecedented step forward in the history of spaceflight, even compared to the most active years of the Apollo program, reports Gizmodo.