NASA is leading the way to the Moon, but the military won't be far behind - Ars Technica

Overview

NASA is leading the way to the Moon, but the military won’t be far behind

“I just don’t want to get caught flat-footed when we start to have to protect US interests out there.”

Details

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The US military has always been part of NASA’s human spaceflight program. The first astronauts were nearly all military pilots, and two of the four crew members set to fly around the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission were Navy test pilots before joining the astronaut corps.

Artemis II, the first crew mission to the Moon’s vicinity since 1972, is set for launch Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Commander Reid Wiseman and pilot Victor Glover, both Navy test pilots, will be at the controls of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for the ride to space. NASA astronaut Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen round out the four-person crew.

The mission will depart from NASA property on Florida’s Space Coast, but the Space Force will play an important role in the launch. A range crew from the Space Force will track the SLS rocket as it arcs over the Atlantic Ocean. Their primary job will be ensuring public safety, with the unenviable responsibility of sending a destruct signal to the rocket if it flies off course. Thankfully for the astronauts inside the spacecraft, the Orion capsule has an abort rocket to pull it away from an exploding launch vehicle in the event of a catastrophic failure.

An Air Force rescue team is on standby to rapidly deploy and retrieve the Artemis II astronauts if there’s an in-flight abort. Assuming everything goes well, the Navy has the charge of recovering the Orion spacecraft and its four astronauts at the end of their nine-day flight around the Moon.

These responsibilities are nothing new to the military. The Space Force oversees public safety for every launch from Florida’s Space Coast, whether it’s a military or civilian mission. The Air Force has a long history of providing rescue support for NASA human spaceflight missions, and the Navy scooped up the Apollo astronauts when they returned from the Moon more than 50 years ago.

What’s new today is the US military views space as a potential battlefield—a “warfighting domain” in Pentagon parlance. The great power competition between the United States and China already extends to space. Each nation is developing and demonstrating weapons that could disable or destroy the other’s satellites in orbit, degrading their military capacities on Earth.

Today, potential conflict zones in space are limited to a region between low-Earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit, from a few hundred miles altitude up to 22,000 miles. The Space Force is in the final stages of developing a roadmap for the next 15 years, identifying where the service needs to grow and evolve to respond to changing threats and priorities. The document hasn’t been released publicly, but Pentagon officials have said it will address the possibility of the the Moon or cislunar space, the region of space around the Moon, becoming a theater for military operations.

This mosaic of the Moon’s south pole region was made from approximately 1,500 images from the Clementine spacecraft, a joint NASA-DOD mission in the 1990s that discovered the first hints of water ice inside permanently shadowed craters.

President Trump signed an executive order in December that, among other things, directs the government to ensure the ability to detect, characterize, and counter threats to US space interests all the way out to the Moon.

Thomas Ainsworth, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, believes it is time for the Space Force to expand its reach.

“We do need to begin integrating cislunar capability into the Space Force,” Ainsworth said at an industry conference in March. “We are serious about that. We are going to be standing up leadership positions and integration points where we can start bringing those technologies in and actually have a plan to execute them going forward.”

A month earlier, in February, the top general in charge of US Space Command shared a similar view.

“This is a location for potential military operations in the future, so at US Space Command, we are very interested in being able to track what’s happening in cislunar space,” said Gen. Stephen Whiting. “NASA is about to take us back to the Moon with the Artemis II mission, and then the follow-on missions go back to the surface. The Chinese are operating in cislunar space with some of their launches. And, of course, they have aspirations to go back with humans on the surface as well.”

Military units operating under the auspices of Space Command will turn their attention toward Artemis II as it transits to the Moon. Whiting said Space Command will use the opportunity to rehearse and refine tactics, techniques, and procedures by tracking the spacecraft’s location and maneuvers.

“Anytime we know something is going to the Moon, we’re going to use it,” Whiting told Ars in February.

Space Command is one of the military’s combatant commands. Central Command covers the Middle East, Northern Command operates in North America and Southern Command is responsible for South America. European and Africa Commands cover those continents. Indo-Pacific Command is the largest of the military’s terrestrial combatant commands. Space Command covers everything else, from an altitude of 100 kilometers extending out to infinity.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s senior general who sits on the joint chiefs of staff, said the Defense Department is still figuring out its role as human activity expands in the Solar System.

“As US interests go farther and farther into space, there’s going to be a need to protect and defend those interests,” Saltzman said. “That’s where we get involved. So, we’ve got to pay attention to exactly what is it that NASA is going to do? How far are they going? What is the PRC (China) doing in cislunar [space]? What are their interests there?”

The Artemis II mission is not going to the Moon this month.

NASA announced an overhaul of its Artemis lunar program last week. The agency is canceling development of a space station in orbit around the Moon to focus on a permanent base on the surface.

The Moon is big—it has slightly less surface area than the continent of Asia—but it’s not too fanciful to imagine a scenario where different nations or companies might have their eyes on the same piece of real estate. Some places are more ripe for exploration than others. Near the Moon’s south pole, there are eternally dark craters that harbor water ice deposits, and peaks of eternal light that offer access to near-continuous sunlight. The Moon has resources that could enable further exploration, and some minerals that might be economically useful if brought back to Earth.

“We want to make sure that we’re not surprised at cislunar space, and that some other actor doesn’t begin to use it for military advantage,” Saltzman said.”

“We’re involved in the discussions because we have a role to play, but we’re not the lead. NASA’s got it,” Saltzman said. “We’re about to send astronauts back to the Moon. That’s pretty exciting. So that is going to drive a lot of the system and discussions. I just don’t want to get caught flat-footed when we start to have to protect US interests out there, so we’re along for the ride.”

“Is it physical, meaning there’s space on the Moon that we have to protect? I don’t know yet. I’m still waiting for that to unfold,” Saltzman said. “That’s why I say we’re not leading that effort, but we want to be involved.”

The first military mission to fly to the Moon this century is undergoing development by the Air Force Research Laboratory. Named Oracle, the project will consist of at least two small satellites. One of them will focus on demonstrating mobility and navigation in cislunar space, while the other will detect and track known and unknown objects around the Moon.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman delivers a keynote address during the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Convention in Orlando, Florida, on December 11, 2025.

NASA and the Space Force anticipate more traffic in cislunar space as crew missions, robotic orbiters and landers, and international spacecraft travel to and from the Moon. The number of missions planned to go to the Moon will fall far short of the some 45,000 objects the Space Force routinely tracks closer to Earth.

But observing objects in cislunar space from the Earth is not easy. First, the Moon is a quarter-million miles away, so spacecraft or debris will appear vanishingly faint to sensors near the Earth. The Moon and the Sun far outshine these objects. Second, using a satellite stationed near the Moon to obtain a fix and vector for an object requires precise navigation, a capability not readily available without reliable GPS signals.

If anyone knows exactly where a satellite is around the Moon today, it is due to the generosity of its operator. If they choose to, spacecraft owners can provide detailed ephemeris data, revealing their location and movement, but there’s no way to force any operator to publish this information. Some operators may not want to share their location for competitive or strategic advantage.

There is also the risk of a satellite breakup in lunar orbit that could create a field of space debris. There is currently no way to track such small fragments at lunar distances, raising the risk of damaging or destructive collisions. If a lunar satellite disintegrated, it could “compromise international science missions and destabilize emerging lunar economic activity,” according to a 2025 report from the Mitre Corporation, a not-for-profit organization that manages several federally funded research centers.

Some generals bring the subject of lunar military operations back to Earth. In 2024, Ars asked Space Force Maj. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, then a one-star general, about the military’s view of the Moon. He identified a potential adversary’s use of the Moon or orbits around them as a launch point for an attack directed at US assets closer to the Earth.

“We’re not fighting over mineral deposits on an asteroid somewhere. We’re not, right now, shepherding convoys to Mars,” Mastalir said. “These are terrestrial conflicts that we hope we can deter. We also don’t want them to, although it’s more and more likely that they may, extend into space or even start in space.

“Some day in the future, that may change, but for now, I’d be more concerned just about what these new orbits present, what that does for potential attack vectors to our traditional operating [areas].”

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Key Takeaways

NASA is leading the way to the Moon, but the military won’t be far behind
“I just don’t want to get caught flat-footed when we start to have to protect US interests out there
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—The US military has always been part of NASA’s human spaceflight program
Artemis II, the first crew mission to the Moon’s vicinity since 1972, is set for launch Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida
The mission will depart from NASA property on Florida’s Space Coast, but the Space Force will play an important role in the launch