If my 1980s-era Usborne Book of The Future was to be believed (and, frankly, it served as my bible when I was growing-up), at the beginning of the 21st Century – along with flatscreen TVs, electric cars and telephones that “have pictures as well as sound” – there would be astronauts living and working in a city on the Moon.

Occupying vast domes connected by pressurised underground passageways, “Moonies” would work at consoles surrounded by banks of computers or bounce across the surface in Moon jeeps on their way to the Moon mines.

Since the last astronaut left his final footstep in 1972, however, the only evidence that people once occupied the Moon consists of little more than a few flags, three rovers, a dozen cameras and 96 bags of human waste (you can read more facts on Apollo here). Whatever happened to the Moon base we were promised?

“One of the big goals of what we’re doing today, is to make sure that this isn’t flags and footprints and then it gets cancelled again,” says Nasa’s strategy and architecture lead for the exploration systems development mission directorate architecture development office Nujoud Merancy. In non-Nasa speak, that means Merancy is one of the key people responsible for planning the agency’s return to the Moon.

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“We want to lay the groundwork so that this can be an inevitable process that goes forward,” she says, “and we don’t spend 50 years not exploring beyond low Earth orbit again like we have for the last 50 years.”

And, so far, that plan is working out. Nasa’s first uncrewed Artemis mission returned to Earth in December 2022 after almost four weeks in space. Travelling far beyond the Moon, it proved the capabilities of the Orion capsule, its European Space Agency (Esa) Service Module and the giant SLS rocket that blasted it on its way. Artemis II is due to carry the first astronauts to lunar orbit in 2024 and, sometime in the middle of the decade during Artemis III, two astronauts will land near the lunar south pole. At least one of them will be a woman.

The first astronauts to land on the Moon since the 1970s are due to travel there on Artemis III later this decade (Credit: Red Huber/Getty Images)

The crew of the final Apollo mission, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, spent the longest on the lunar surface of any astronauts so far: 75 hours in total. Cernan likened it to a camping expedition – they ate and slept, in hammocks, inside the compact lander and put on their spacesuits to head outside. In comparison, the astronauts of Artemis III are scheduled to stay on the Moon for around a week and can expect a few more home comforts – and a lot more space.

The lander they will use is being provided by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and is based on his Starship concept, which was originally conceived to carry 100 people to Mars. Given that Nasa only wants to convey two people to the Moon, there should be plenty of room for a laboratory, storage for a rover and even a few home comforts like beds, a kitchen and toilet.

“I don’t know that we can discuss a lot of details at this point,” Merancy says. “But yes, [SpaceX’s] proposed solution exceeds our government requirements, so there are other discussions going on for how you could you use that margin for other purposes but there’re no agreements in place today.”

Whatever the final specification for the Artemis III lander, during subsequent missions, astronauts are going to live on the Moon for extended periods and explore further. This is likely to involve them using their spaceship as a base and travelling around in pressurised lunar rovers – mobile habitats trundling across the surface.

“To get the range on the Moon, you need mobility systems, the crew can’t go very far on foot,” says Merancy. “The science we want to do is in a lot of locations around the Moon, the goal is to build systems that would be capable of month-long or better excursions.”

But the longer you stay, the riskier it