Why NASA Needs 21 Moon Landings in the Next 3 Years | Nadia Drake

Link to full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FQghS0GRhU

NASA has published a timeline for living on the moon, and the dates are closer than most people assume. The plan runs in phases: from now through 2029, secure reliable access to the lunar surface and start experimenting there. Between 2029 and 2032, stand up initial moon base operating capability. From 2032 on, activate the base and hold a semi-permanent crew presence near the lunar south pole. The chart Danny pulls up on screen also lists what that takes: roughly 25 launches and 21 lunar landings inside the first phase alone, and not all of them are crewed.

Nadia Drake walks through what that schedule actually means. The first step is the next Artemis flight, and even that has already moved: an intermediate rendezvous mission was added, so the crewed landing slipped from Artemis 3 to Artemis 4. Her read on the plan is blunt. The United States is good at low Earth orbit, but it has not had much luck recently getting hardware down onto the lunar surface. Six flawless landings fifty years ago do not make the next twenty-one automatic. The south pole is the target because that is where the resources are thought to be, both for the base itself and for anything that comes after it.

Then there is the part nobody has solved. Nothing already sitting on the moon has any legal protection. Not the Apollo hardware, not the Russian or Chinese landers, not the bootprints, and not the family photo Charlie Duke left behind, which cooked in 250 degree sunlight. Preservation depends entirely on behavioral norms, on whether whoever lands next decides to treat a landing site like an archaeological site. As lunar travel becomes as routine as low Earth orbit, with commercial companies flying alongside national agencies, that gap stops being theoretical.

Also in this clip: China’s first known reusable booster landing, caught in a net, how that compares to the tower arms and barge recoveries SpaceX uses, and why Artemis is flying refurbished space shuttle engines, along with the question of what happens when those engines run out.

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Written by Danny Jones Clips