NASA's lunar base chief: 'We'll have to take risks to move fast'

Two days after NASA announced the next phase of its lunar ambitions, Jeff Bezos's rocket exploded on the test stand. The New Glenn, the vehicle chosen to carry the first landing module to the Moon this autumn, had failed during engine ignition trials. It was not the first stumble. Yet Carlos García-Galán, the Spanish engineer who took command of NASA's lunar base program just two months ago, had already made peace with the idea that failure would be part of the journey.

García-Galán, 52, carries more than 27 years of experience in human spaceflight. He was appointed to lead the program at a moment when NASA's ambitions had crystallized into something more focused than before: get to the Moon by 2032 with a permanent human presence, build the infrastructure for sustained habitation, develop nuclear propulsion for Mars, and maintain continuous operations in low Earth orbit. The agency had learned that spreading itself thin across too many objectives diluted its power. Now it would concentrate its resources on a smaller number of goals, and the money would follow.

The scale of what García-Galán is attempting is staggering. NASA plans between four and ten lunar missions in the coming year alone. This stretches every part of the system—manufacturing, supply chains, testing facilities. The private sector has already begun expanding its capacity to meet the demand. Blue Origin was selected not because it was the only option, but because its lander had the right dimensions and payload capacity. The lunar terrain vehicle, weighing roughly a ton, needed a spacecraft capable of carrying three tons. Few vehicles met that specification. SpaceX had made similar investments in its Starship; Blue Origin had done the same with its lander. Both companies were betting on learning through real missions, testing repeatedly before the stakes became highest.

Yet the setbacks have been real. Astrobotic's Griffin lander failed. Intuitive Machines encountered problems. Starship itself has stumbled. García-Galán does not shy from acknowledging that things may not unfold exactly as planned. But he frames this not as recklessness but as a deliberate shift in philosophy. For ten or fifteen years, NASA had been caught in a cycle of planning ever more complex systems, spending more money, taking more time, and ultimately launching nothing. Now the agency wanted to move faster by moving smaller. Build something simpler, test it, learn from it, build the next thing. When you have ten missions a year instead of four, a single failure is not catastrophic.

The question of risk takes on sharper edges when nuclear reactors enter the conversation. NASA plans to install power plants on the Moon. The south pole, where the agency intends to establish its base, contains regions of permanent darkness. Nuclear power becomes not a luxury but a necessity. García-Galán points to decades of experience managing reactors near populated areas on Earth. The reactors destined for the Moon will be far smaller than terrestrial plants, serving a handful of astronauts rather than millions of people. The challenge is not whether nuclear power can be operated safely—it can—but how to make it compact enough to fit inside a spacecraft and launch it without incident. This is an engineering problem, not a fundamental one.

The larger constraint is money and political will. The lunar base program has a budget of roughly 30 billion dollars across three phases. But other parts of NASA are hemorrhaging funds under the Trump administration's budget cuts. Scientific research projects have absorbed brutal reductions. García-Galán acknowledges this reality but argues that the lunar program itself will create new capacity that benefits science broadly. More spacecraft capable of carrying payloads to the Moon means more opportunities for scientific instruments, even smaller ones. He is attempting to coordinate across NASA's departments to ensure that what the lunar program needs, it gets.

Spain, García-Galán's home country, already has a foothold in this enterprise. Airbus Crisa and other Spanish companies have built components for the power distribution systems. The Gateway program, which was paused and redesigned, had already produced modules and equipment that can be repurposed for surface operations. Rather than waste what had been built, NASA is finding ways to adapt it. There is limited loss of time and money, García-Galán believes, and the shift toward a surface base justifies the disruption.

What remains unspoken but present in every answer is the geopolitical dimension. China is advancing its own lunar program. The space race is heating up. García-Galán will not be drawn into discussing how the Moon might be divided or governed, but the urgency in his words—the willingness to accept risk, to move fast, to learn by doing—reflects the reality that this is not merely a scientific endeavor. It is a competition for presence, for capability, for the future. The engineer from Málaga has been given the task of moving faster than caution would normally allow, and he has accepted it.