In December 1972, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent 75 hours on the lunar surface during Apollo 17, driving a rover, conducting three spacewalks, and collecting samples in what remains the longest crewed visit to another world. When Cernan climbed back into the ascent module, he became the last human to stand on the moon. More than 50 years later, NASA intends not just to return, but to stay - and it has a plan for that.

In late March, the agency’s Ignition event laid out an aggressive three-phase plan to establish a permanent lunar base by 2030, alongside a new commercial framework called “Science as a Service” designed to accelerate the technologies that will make it possible. Early robotic landings would pave the way, followed by semi-habitable infrastructure buildouts, all leading to a continuous human presence. The plan relies on a vast coalition of commercial and international partners, including pressurized rovers from Japan and a habitation module from Italy. The base will enable surface exploration and serve as a test ground for technologies like nuclear propulsion for Mars transits.

Alongside the moon base plan, Ignition prioritizes the “Science as a Service” RFI, through which NASA’s Science Mission Directorate aims to build commercial partnerships to accelerate technology maturation and transition scientific capabilities into operational use. Rather than develop and own the end-to-end lifecycle of technology, NASA will partner with research institutions and industry to validate technologies, share flight infrastructure, and speed up the timeline to commercial markets. But notably, accelerating health and biological technologies is absent from the outlined priorities.

The RFI is scoped to Earth science, space weather, and astrophysics - important fields, sure - but urgency should also be placed on determining whether a crew member’s bones will fracture after six months at one-sixth gravity, or whether lunar dust will permanently scar their lungs. Supporting human life on the moon requires a deeper understanding of the biological risks identified across decades of spaceflight. The International Space Station has enabled researchers to monitor changes in human physiology in microgravity, from bone mineral density loss to immune shifts to cardiovascular deconditioning. However, the lunar environment hosts challenges that ISS research alone cannot resolve. We have no long-duration human data at partial gravity, and the physiological response at one-sixth gravity over weeks or months remains an open question. The relationship between gravitational load and bone remodeling is nonlinear in ways we cannot predict from zero-g data alone. Lunar-specific factors like exposure to regolith present their own concerns, and countermeasures need to be created, matured, and validated beyond engineering controls.

Every extreme environment humans have built, from Antarctic research stations to the ISS, eventually becomes a life sciences management challenge. Closed-loop air and water recycling depends on biological and chemical processes. Food production over long durations requires plant biology, controlled environment agriculture, and microbial management in sealed, irradiated, low-gravity environments. If the moon base is to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency rather than total dependence on Earth resupply, biomanufacturing and engineered biological systems become operational necessities, not academic interests.

The Science as a Service framework is well designed, creating shared validation pathways, integration standards, and technology transition pipelines that could accelerate progress in space health and biology. It was built by parts of NASA that already have mature commercial partnerships - satellite operators, telescope programs, Earth observation companies. The framework should serve as the blueprint for NASA’s biology-facing components to develop the same partnership architecture. Ignition was driven by the December 2025 Executive Order on Ensuring American Space Superiority, which specifically mandates sustained human presence on the Moon. If Science as a Service is meant to serve that objective, it should include the science without which sustained presence is not achievable.

The research and commercial community working on these problems is already growing. Biotech companies are flying microgravity experiments and developing space-based production platforms. Commercial spaceflight operators are generating health datasets from an increasingly diverse astronaut population. Academic medical centers and international space agencies are investing in radiation biology, space pharmacology, and bioregenerative life support. Neither interest nor capability is missing from potential partners. NASA has built the right model at Ignition, but the scope of work needs to match the mission. If we are serious about having a sustained presence on the moon, biology has to be part of the plan.

Jackson Brougher, PhD, is an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine and a space health research scientist at the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) at Baylor’s Center for Space Medicine.