Valerie StaggsNASA’s Brian Hughes on building a lunar base and why data centers will move to space.
When Brian Hughes took the podium Wednesday at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, he began by answering two questions he often fields in his role at NASA. “Let me get ahead of the curve and tell you the answer to two questions,” Hughes said. “One, yes, we landed on the moon. And two, are aliens real? I don’t know.”
As NASA’s first senior director of launch operations, Hughes oversees NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Both launch sites are pivotal in fulfilling five goals NASA has set for the space program.
In 40 minutes, Hughes spoke on NASA’s bold plans for returning to the moon, establishing a lunar base, accelerating space nuclear power and ensuring U.S. dominance in space exploration.
“America’s space program stands at a pivotal moment,” Hughes said. “The world is more complex, the competition is sharper, and the stakes are higher. The decisions we make today will decide whether space remains a free domain, a domain of free exploration and shared discovery, or one defined by restricted access and strategic vulnerability.”
To the moon and beyond
The moon is the focus of two of NASA’s goals: to prioritize the Artemis program and to establish a permanent presence on the moon.
Artemis, NASA’s lunar exploration program, is a series of crewed space missions aimed at returning humans to the moon and building a long-term presence there. Artemis II was completed in April.
“The 10-day mission around the moon walked our second step toward returning humans to the lunar surface and building that lasting presence there,” Hughes said. “America made a mistake after it went to the moon a few times. It left and it spent decades with it in the rearview mirror. With Artemis II we went farther than we’ve ever gone, and we demonstrated that we can get astronauts to the moon, get them around the moon, and get them back home safely. Now teams at Kennedy Space Center are full steam ahead toward Artemis III.”
Set to launch next year, Artemis III will use the Orion capsule to dock with test versions of commercial human landing systems from Blue Origin and SpaceX to see which one will ultimately take Americans back to the moon on Artemis IV in 2028.
Hughes spoke of the moon’s pivotal role in advancing science and further exploration. “The moon is the proving ground. Ultimately, by building a permanent presence there and learning how to live and care for ourselves on the lunar surface, that gives us the building blocks to do the same on Mars.”
Partnering with the private sector
Companies including Blue Origin and SpaceX are playing an increasingly important role in space exploration, leading to partnerships between the commercial space industry and NASA.
The private sector is pivotal in fulfilling another of NASA’s goals: accelerating space nuclear power and propulsion to build a nuclear NASA. “We’re going to lead the way in research on nuclear propulsion,” Hughes said. “But, once it’s able to be taken to market, we’re going to hand it off to the next generation of commercial innovators to build nuclear-propelled aircraft over at a massive scale. Fundamentally, the government should invest in the things that nobody else will or can’t. That’s how we look at what we are doing at NASA.”
Developing larger rockets to transport humans to space is also part of the collaboration between the private sector and NASA. “Right now, the only American system that can get astronauts to and from the space station is the SpaceX Falcon 9,” Hughes said.
“They’ve probably been the most reliable commercially manufactured rockets in human history, but SpaceX is moving away from that one to develop what I call a big kahuna — the Starship — which we expect to have launching from Kennedy Space Center for the first time in the next few months.” SpaceX has been launching unmanned test flights from its Starbase spaceport in Boca Chica, Texas.
The race for space
As NASA continues to expand its presence in space, China is also pushing for a strong footprint of its own.
A fourth goal of NASA — maintaining a robust presence in low Earth orbit beyond the 25 years of constant American presence on a sustained International Space Station — speaks to the agency’s focus on a strong, continuous grasp on space.
As the U.S., China and other countries seek to grow their presence in space, concerns about how different countries compete in space have surfaced. Seventy-five nations, including the U.S., have signed the Artemis Accords, committing to peaceful exploration, transparency and sharing of resources. China is not one of them.
“China doesn’t play by those rules,” Hughes said. “China has no separation between their civilian and military capacity. They build for both and they launch for both and they’re very willing to do both. In order to stay ahead of them, our civilian work has to continue as part of the national imperative, not because we want to see a weaponization or military version of space but because we have to get there to ensure that it doesn’t become bad.”
China is targeting a date in 2029 or 2030 for going to the moon, Hughes said.
Seeing into deep space
NASA has set its sights well beyond the moon and Mars. In August, it launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. With a field of vision 100 times larger than the Hubble Telescope, it has the potential to measure light from billions of galaxies. The telescope will advance NASA’s study of dark energy and exoplanets, which are worlds orbiting stars other than our sun.
“To date, human technology has confirmed about 6,300 exoplanets in existence,” Hughes said. “With the abilities of the Roman Space Telescope, we expect in just the next few years that number to jump to 100,000 or more. And in identifying them, we look at spectrographic images that tell us whether or not the building blocks of life as we understand it are on those planets. That will be the most comprehensive expansion of our understanding, not just of our galaxy but galaxies far beyond.”
The telescope is expected to ultimately get into an orbit about 1 million miles from Earth, Hughes said.
Data centers in space
Toward the end of the event, Hughes was posed the question of putting data centers in space. “It’s very feasible and it will happen,” he said.
The environment of space eliminates many of the concerns people have on Earth, Hughes said. “The big complaint here on Earth is that they consume a lot of power, and they’re very noisy and sort of impactful to the surrounding environment. So, when you plan for them on Earth, you have to plan for energy consumption and their location and relationship to people that don’t want the things that come with it too close.”
Hughes then listed advantages in space. “Space gives you a lot of latitude. A lot of the power consumption is cooling for the processes that are part of the data set. Space is a little different temperature than down here. So, the cooling gets a lot simpler if you’re out in space. You also have unmediated solar energy. So, you have the capacity to have a lot of power generation through solar arrays built into low Earth orbit satellites. For both energy purposes and temperature, data centers in space are real.”
The space state
As Hughes spoke of the last of NASA’s five goals — to invest in its workforce to deliver with urgency and a commitment to excellence — he emphasized the role Florida has and continues to play in the growth of the space program.
“In 2019, Kennedy supported 17 mission launches. In 2025, that was 109. Kennedy Space Center’s success is built on public-private collaboration. More than 150 partners and 450 active agreements make the region a true innovation ecosystem,” Hughes said. “NASA supported over 35,000 Florida jobs in the 2025 fiscal year and drove billions in economic outcome. These investments across Florida businesses, universities, and nonprofits underscore Kennedy’s role both as a scientific and economic engine. Kennedy’s success and Florida’s success are inseparable.”
Investing in space
NASA, like many other government programs, faces money challenges. The Kennedy Space Center was built decades ago. Modernizing the center is a priority, Hughes said. Building the supply of commodities including the chemicals and gases that fuel rocket propulsion, making ground transportation systems more efficient and growing the capacity for more launches and more payload processing all require significant investments.
Still, the stakes are too high to not invest in America’s future in space, Hughes said. “We are accelerating exploration, we’re strengthening the economy, and we’re reinforcing American leadership.”
Considering how far NASA’s understanding of space has progressed since Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon in 1969, the possibilities of future exploration are endless. “Why explore space? We answer because exploration has always been the wellspring of human progress,” Hughes said. “Because every horizon we cross expands what we know, strengthens who we are, and inspires what we can become. Because staying still has never been the story of this nation. And because the universe is vast, waiting, and filled with promise.”
