NASA opened its Moon Base Student Challenge during a MAX POWER event at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida on Sunday. The $1 million program welcomes entries from U.S. high school and post-secondary teams for Moon Base designs.
The program falls under NASA’s Golden Age of Science initiative. Those designs target the base the agency is building at the lunar South Pole region. Astronauts will live, work, and explore there.
Proposals must cover six topics: astronaut safety, surface mobility, communications networks, life-support systems, construction, and power generation and storage. The list covers the main areas for proposed lunar base operations.
The challenge’s multiphase structure backs NASA’s goal of building the technical skills of tomorrow’s aerospace workforce. Team members will shape Moon Base ideas across the six categories while developing abilities for space industry careers and advancing new concepts for base technologies.
The required outputs resemble professional work, such as trade studies, concept proposals, and briefings for stakeholders. It opens career-relevant skill-building to people from technical, vocational, and many academic tracks, even without prior specialized engineering or technical experience.
Student teams must sign up using the NASA STEM Gateway, with registration staying open through Jan. 25, 2027. All teams hoping to compete must meet the registration requirement and deadline.
Carlos García-Galán, who manages the Moon Base Program, said the agency hopes to draw on student ingenuity and innovation while weighing every need explorers might face while living and working on the Moon. Elaine Ho, associate administrator for the Office of STEM Engagement at NASA Headquarters, said students represent the next generation of explorers and innovators, adding that their viewpoints matter for imagining life beyond Earth. She said she anticipates the creativity and ingenuity the challenge will bring out.
NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement created the challenge together with the Moon Base Program. The Institute of Competition Sciences operates the challenge through a contract with a NASA center focused on collaborative innovation, which sits inside the Research and Technology Mission Directorate.
The student challenge took place beside a broader commercial lunar rollout at the MAX POWER aerospace expo and air show at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA announced on Saturday that SpaceX, Blue Origin, and six additional aerospace firms are eligible to compete for lunar delivery contracts worth as much as $10 billion as part of an effort to establish a permanent lunar base.
The agency also picked Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, iSpace US, Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, and Voyager Technologies to vie for future lunar delivery flights alongside SpaceX and Blue Origin. The group joins the two familiar names in the broader commercial lunar effort.
The Commercial Lunar Payload Services framework tops out at $10 billion combined over 10 years and sets a ceiling for future task orders instead of committing money that has already been awarded. The agency also raised the cap on its current Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract, moving it from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion for the opening phase of Moon base planning.
Jared Isaacman said in a statement that NASA is assembling the Moon Base one mission at a time, with returning astronauts finding the first base elements already on the surface when they arrive. Isaacman’s remarks came with the commercial lunar contract announcement at the MAX POWER event. “We are building the Moon Base mission by mission,” Isaacman said.
Blue Origin won a separate $94 million base contract to carry NASA’s nuclear-powered PROMISE rover to the lunar South Pole, and the contract includes an additional $140 million through a performance-based option. The rover, formally called the Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration, will examine the surface and subsurface, with attention to areas believed to harbor water ice. The ice could help support a sustained human presence on the Moon.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will construct the PROMISE rover from spare flight hardware and engineering test units left over from the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers, a method the agency says will lower development costs. The lab plans to launch the rover aboard Blue Origin’s Mark 1 lunar lander in late 2028 for an 18-month mission.
The agency handed out six transportation task orders totaling about $1.3 billion to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin, and Impulse Space. SpaceX also received a separate demonstration under an existing lunar logistics contract to launch communications satellites on its Starship rocket into the space between Earth and the Moon in 2028. The effort aims to create communications networks connecting astronauts, mission controllers, and future lunar infrastructure.
The agency gave awards to Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company, along with Redwire and Yank Technologies for parts of a planned lunar power and communications tower. The tower will mix solar power with wireless power transfer to back surface operations on the Moon.
The projects will support a sustained American presence at the Moon’s South Pole, with commercial partners delivering the equipment and infrastructure astronauts will need before arrival, NASA says. NASA views lunar operations as a stepping stone for crews traveling to Mars.
Join the discussion