How many robots does it take to build a base on the Moon? Based on the update NASA released in early August on its Moon Base project, the planned outpost near the lunar South Pole, the answer sits somewhere north of twenty, and every one of them arrives before any astronaut sets foot back on the surface.
Phase I of the project, running through 2029, calls for more than twenty robotic landings, each designed to incrementally build up the system’s capabilities and validate the operational pieces later missions will rely on. Before astronauts arrive, these robots will need to place scientific instruments to characterize the lunar environment, test new technologies, and start assembling the infrastructure a future human presence will depend on.
NASA is not building these landers alone. Four commercial partners are working in parallel to deliver their own spacecraft by 2028. Blue Origin is pushing forward with testing on its Blue Moon MK1 lander, nicknamed Endurance, which has already completed an environmental test campaign that included a thermal-vacuum assessment at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Firefly Aerospace, meanwhile, is preparing Blue Ghost Mission 2, a dual-spacecraft stack standing over 22 feet tall, nearly three times the height of its first mission in 2025, aiming to become the first American landing on the Moon’s far side, a radio-quiet region ideal for studying lunar geology and the so-called cosmic Dark Ages.
Intuitive Machines is working on its third Nova-C lander, named Trinity, which will also carry Altus-1, the company’s first data-relay satellite, with the goal of exploring Reiner Gamma, a magnetic anomaly on the lunar surface never studied up close in quite this way. Voyager Technologies is testing its Griffin-1 lander at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California; built as an infrastructure-class lander and planned for launch by late 2026, it will carry what is described as the largest commercial payload ever sent to the lunar surface, including a rover meant to test long-duration mobility.
Rounding out the picture is Northrop Grumman, developing technology demonstration payloads meant to test systems capable of surviving the lunar night, a stretch of multi-day darkness during which temperatures plunge, along with shared power infrastructure designed to support other instruments on the surface.
None of this ties back to the Canary Islands, and the research for this article turned up no concrete local connection. What remains, though, is a project that, set apart from the louder headlines about artificial intelligence, tells a different story about how space exploration is changing: no longer the work of a single government agency, but a patchwork of private companies competing, one landing at a time, for the right to say they helped build humanity’s next base off Earth.
