NASA plans permanent moon station

An international team of astronauts will be living and working at a permanent moon base to be built at one of the resource-rich lunar poles within two decades, NASA announced Monday.

Earth’s first off-world colonists will cruise the surface in a new generation lunar lander that will function like a low-gravity pickup truck, possibly journeying to the dark side to build the most ambitious collection of observatories ever constructed, NASA said.

The announcement of NASA’s vision to build a permanent scientific research station on the moon represents the space agency’s first outline of its plans once it reaches the moon, scheduled no later than 2020.

“We will begin with short missions. Then we will build up to the point where we are staying 180 days, and then we will have a permanent presence,” Doug Cooke, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems, said at a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The permanent base could be operational as early as 2024, officials said.

“We’re going to go after a lunar base,” said Scott Horowitz, associate administrator for exploration systems. “This is a very, very big decision; one of the few where the science and exploration communities agree.”