“It’s not about one lander. It’s about the fourth and fifth lander, the tenth mission.” Carlos Garcia-Galán, NASA’s Moon Base Program Manager, told the agency’s Moon Base news conference on Saturday that the base will be built by flying landers in numbers, not as one-off missions. The number of builds, he said, is what brings high reliability, because it lets NASA learn how fast it can build each lander as well as how many it can land successfully.
Garcia-Galán was laying out the production logic behind NASA’s plan for a permanent lunar base at the Moon Base news conference on November 7, 2026, held during the MAX POWER expo at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Agency leaders used the briefing to update the program’s lander cadence and commercial partnerships. His point was that a base cannot depend on a single spacecraft: a steady line of repeat builds is what makes landings routine, keeps costs predictable and lets the program recover when one mission falls short. The remarks were carried live by NASA and are public domain.
Video: NASA
