NASA has big plans for the moon. Within two years, if all goes smoothly, human feet will tread its surface for the first time in more than half a century. Beginning around 2032, a permanent outpost, called Moon Base, will house astronauts for extended stays. Complete with habitats, power systems, transportation, and other infrastructure, the site will support what the agency describes as “an enduring human presence.”
This new era of exploration calls not only for spacecraft, landers and rovers, but also for a way to coordinate bustling activity on and around the moon.
“All of these things need to know where they are at a given time so they don’t bump into each other,” Gregory Heckler, NASA’s deputy program manager for capability development, told Discover.
To that end, he and his colleagues are working to create something like lunar GPS — a system of communications and navigation services that will allow astronauts and autonomous vehicles to figure out their location, their destination, and the time needed to get there.
Read More: NASA Unveils Roadmap for Permanent Moon Base and Increased Missions to the Moon
How We Use GPS on Earth
On Earth, we largely take these functions for granted. Radio signals from the Global Positioning System, or GPS, a constellation of 31 satellites operated by the U.S. military, allow smartphones to locate themselves almost instantly to within a few feet, according to NASA. The European Union manages a separate constellation of 28 satellites, called Galileo, and several other countries have similar arrangements. But on the moon, some 240,000 miles away, the signals from these satellites become faint and difficult for receivers to detect.
Explore All OptionsThis hasn’t stopped humanity’s enterprising spirit in the past. Project Apollo, which landed 12 astronauts on the moon between 1969 and 1972, achieved perhaps the greatest technological feat of the 20th century while relying on navigation systems that seem rudimentary compared with modern GPS. But according to Heckler, those missions didn’t demand fine spatial precision. The ongoing Artemis and Moon Base programs will.
One solution is to design receivers sensitive enough to detect the signals already emanating from GPS, Galileo, and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). NASA and the Italian Space Agency took a major step in that direction in 2025 when the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) acquired GPS signals from the moon’s surface, far beyond their intended coverage area.
Establishing A GPS for the Moon
But Joel Parker, NASA’s cislunar strategist, notes that this approach requires a clear line of sight—it won’t work on the far side of the moon, which always faces away from Earth (let alone on Mars, which, on average, lies 140 million miles from Earth).
“We need to be much more flexible than that,” Parker told Discover. “We need a local system that’s available everywhere at all times.”
NASA intends to build just such a system. In early 2027, one of the agency’s commercial partners, Intuitive Machines, is scheduled to launch the first of five communication and navigation satellites into lunar orbit. Those satellites will beam signals primarily to the moon’s south pole, providing bespoke service to the Moon Base site.
The Intuitive Machines constellation may even outperform Earth-based GPS, partly because its radio waves won’t have to travel through an atmosphere, leaving them undistorted.
“On the moon you don’t have those sources of errors,” Heckler said. “So potentially in the long term it could provide a better service … than we have on Earth today.”
Using Multiple Technologies on the Moon
But lunar navigation will involve more than just a single technology — Earth-based GPS signals will still be useful where they’re available, lunar satellites could provide coverage where they aren’t, and spacecraft and surface vehicles could combine those signals with onboard sensors to determine their positions.
“This is not one-size-fits-all,” Heckler said. “We’re going to have to use various techniques to achieve this larger vision.”
Heckler stated that mission controllers in Houston look forward to a future in which they can watch lunar activity unfold live.
“They want to be able to sit around a big, dynamic, real-time map,” he said. “They want to see all the blue dots move around,” just like on Google Maps, as astronauts travel to and fro taking measurements and collecting rocks.
That may sound like a modest technological advance compared with landing humans on the moon in the first place. But as NASA establishes continuous lunar residence, and even begins to direct its gaze toward Mars, the simple ability to track people and equipment will become essential.
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from NASA: Moon Base
- This article references information from NASA: GPS
- This article references information from the ESA: Galileo
- This article references information from NASA: NASA Successfully Acquires GPS Signals on Moon
- This article references information from NASA: NASA Selects Lunar Relay Contractor for Near Space Network Services
- This article references information from NASA: Mars
