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Moon to Mars Architecture Update: 2025 Architecture Concept Review

Document: NASA's Moon to Mars Architecture: Architecture Update, 2025 Architecture Concept Review. Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. Publication number NP-2025-12-6698-HQ (p. 20). 20 PDF pages. Date and version: neither is printed. The publication number and the download path (/2025/12/) date it to December 2025. It says the ADD revision was "released alongside this document" (p. 3), so it is the companion to ADD Rev C (12/12/2025). Files: text sources/text/docs/2025-12-2025-architecture-update-for-publication.txt; raw PDF sources/raw/docs/2025-12-2025-architecture-update-for-publication.pdf, fetched 2026-10-01T07:22:47Z from https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-architecture-update-for-publication.pdf (per sources/manifest.csv).

Summary. A short, illustrated companion to ADD Rev C. It "summarizes the latest additions to NASA's Moon to Mars Architecture and the agency's Architecture Definition Document" (p. 3). It covers what was new in 2025: two new elements (the lunar utility rover and the lunar nuclear fission system), the first architecture-driven data gaps, and the decision on how many crew the first Mars missions send to the surface. It also covers the tech-gap changes, the deep space standards adopted, how NASA measures the architecture's performance, the six 2025 white papers, and a 2026 look-ahead. Most of it repeats the ADD in shorter form. Four things in it are not in the ADD pages this page was first compared with (pp. 1–104): why the utility rover was added, the fuller reasoning behind the Mars crew number, the performance chart, and the standards adopted by year. On the Mars crew number it disagrees with the ADD (below).

Page numbers

Printed page numbers are one lower than PDF page numbers. The cover has no number, and the contents page is printed "1" (PDF p. 2). The Update's own cross-reference "see the feature on page nine" (p. 14) means the printed 9, the divider of the data-gaps feature (PDF p. 10). The wiki cites PDF page numbers, which match the [page N] markers in the text file. The table below gives both. This differs from the ADD, whose PDF and printed numbers are the same (open question 29).

The caveat on page 3

The Executive Summary opens with a caveat that matters for every page built on Rev C:

"As previously established, the Moon to Mars Architecture products were developed to communicate the state of the architecture, relationships between systems, and open needs for future collaboration to achieve the long-term objectives for exploration. While conversations continue about potential changes in implementation, the products represent the contracted baseline and will be updated and responsive to changes if and when they occur." (p. 3)

So NASA said in December 2025 that implementation changes were under discussion, and that the products show the contracted baseline until changes are made. The Update doesn't say which changes. Later sources record some, such as the restructured Artemis plan of February 2026 and the reuse of Gateway hardware (ADD Rev C source page). The Update closes the summary with "these products will continue to be responsive to and communicate any changes as implemented" (p. 3).

The rest of the summary describes Rev C's "new look, feel, and structure", made in response to "stakeholder feedback". It notes updates to "the objective decomposition (which distills agency-developed objectives into operational capabilities)" and to element functional mappings, "with the full decomposition spreadsheets available on NASA's Moon to Mars Architecture website" (p. 3). Its list of 2025 developments: "two new elements", "architecture-driven data gaps that capture key knowledge needs", and a narrowed "range for the number of astronauts that its initial Mars missions will send to the surface" (p. 3).

Contents by page

Read from the contents page (p. 2) and checked against the PDF.

PDF p. Printed Content Wiki page
1 — Cover this page
2 1 Table of contents this page
3 2 Executive Summary above
4 3 Full-page rendering of the lunar utility rover (no caption) —
5 4 New element: Lunar Utility Rover, with its functional mapping Lunar Utility Rover
6 5 Full-page rendering of a fission power system on the lunar surface (no caption) —
7 6 New element: Lunar Nuclear Fission System, with its functional mapping Lunar Nuclear Fission System
8–9 7–8 Feature: "Building Evolvable Lunar Infrastructure" (C&PNT, power, logistics; a lunar economy) below; the Power, C&PNT and Logistics sub-architecture pages
10–11 9–10 Feature: "Growing NASA's Knowledge Base" (data gaps) Data gaps index
12–13 11–12 Feature: "Defining Number of Crew to Mars Surface" Key definition tasks; Humans to Mars
14 13 Architecture-Driven Technology Gaps, 2025 updates (#0504, #0505 new; #0602 removed) Gaps index
15 14 Deep Space Standards RT-7 Interoperability
16 15 Architecture Performance & Effectiveness, with a chart Architecture definition process
17 16 2025 White Papers (six) below
18 17 2026 Look-Ahead: "Architecture and Artemis II" below
19 18 Full-page photo of four people in flight suits beside an Orion capsule (no caption) —
20 — Back cover: NASA Headquarters address, NP-2025-12-6698-HQ this page

New elements (pp. 5, 7)

Each new element gets a page of description and a "Functional Mapping" table for the Foundational Exploration segment. The ADD's one-pagers (pp. 58, 61) only point to Appendix B for the mapping; the Update prints the function IDs. They match ADD Appendix B.3.8.1 (p. 158) and B.3.11.1 (p. 160), checked. The descriptions differ in wording from the ADD's; the element pages give both.

Element Functions mapped (p. 5 or 7) Element page
Lunar Utility Rover FN-M-501 L, FN-M-503 L, FN-M-701 L, FN-A-104 L, FN-A-105 L, FN-A-302 L Lunar Utility Rover
Lunar Nuclear Fission System FN-P-101 L, FN-P-301 L, FN-P-401 L Lunar Nuclear Fission System

Four of the rover's six functions and all three of the fission system's are on the Moon Base Users Guide's list of Phase 1 functional gaps. Neither source makes that link; the element pages set it out, labeled as the wiki's.

Building Evolvable Lunar Infrastructure (p. 9)

The feature frames power, logistics and C&PNT as utilities:

  • "Sustained lunar exploration requires building lunar infrastructure and services that can provide everything astronauts need to live and work on the Moon. These systems must serve the near term needs of missions while offering extensibility to future exploration."
  • "While short, individual missions can bring everything they need with them to the lunar surface, expanding exploration to include longer durations and more locations will require providing external power, logistics, and communications services. These services are akin to the utilities that serve communities on Earth, but with the added challenge of delivering them to and operating them on the lunar surface."

Three columns follow, one per service. Each is quoted on its sub-architecture page: C&PNT, Power and Logistics. Each column points to a white paper (below).

"Evolving to Meet the Needs of a Lunar Economy" (p. 9): "As exploration of the Moon expands, the demand for these services will grow and new providers can add capacity. While NASA is building the infrastructure that will enable the agency and its international partners to explore the Moon together, commercial entities could create demand for additional services and find opportunities to supply them (e.g., providing commercial power on the lunar surface for government or industry customers). With NASA serving as an anchor customer and validating interoperability standards, the future of lunar exploration will involve many organizations providing and utilizing infrastructure to enable science, resource extraction, and technology development." See RT-9 Commerce and Space Development.

Growing NASA's Knowledge Base (p. 11)

The data-gaps feature condenses the ACR25 data-gaps white paper. It repeats the paper's definition, its "knowledge decomposition" paragraph, its Figure One (data need, acquirable data, data gap; read from the PDF), its paragraph on data gaps and technology gaps, and its Table Two of four gaps with their "data utility" (DN-002 L, DN-007 L, DN-008 L, DN-017 L). Points it adds or words differently:

  • The list in Rev C is "a preliminary list of architecture-driven data gaps, which will evolve annually as NASA closes gaps and identifies new ones" (p. 11).
  • "The term 'gap' is widely used across NASA and the aerospace industry to describe a difference between an existing capability and a current or expected need" (p. 11).
  • "Through the clear demand signal that these architecture-driven data gaps provide, NASA and its partners can better align their data-gathering efforts to support human exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond" (p. 11).
  • The table caption: "Representative architecture-driven data gaps and examples of data utility from the preliminary list published in Architecture Definition Document revision C" (p. 11). Its gap titles print "In-situ" where the white paper's table has "In situ".

See the data gaps index.

Defining Number of Crew to Mars Surface (p. 13)

The December 2025 account of key definition task MD-05 (the 2024 crew complement white paper treats the task at more length, and the February 2025 and January 2026 workshops brief it; all are on Key definition tasks): initial Mars missions "will assume no less than four crew members to the Martian surface, with consideration for up to six crew". It sets out the reasoning under three headings (crew health and safety, operations and Earth independence, engineering complexity) and leaves open whether more crew stay in Mars orbit. It disagrees with the ADD, which says "no fewer than six" where the Update says "up to six". Both are on Key definition tasks. The page ends with a link to "the Mars architecture trade space" on NASA's website. That page is held: Mars Architecture Trade Space, written up on Humans to Mars.

Technology gap updates (p. 14)

  • How the list changes. "NASA publishes a list of architecture-driven technology gaps in the Architecture Definition Document annually to help partners guide their technology development efforts in support of space exploration. The agency refines this list each year, adding new technology gaps as they arise, closing gaps as their needs are fulfilled, and updating the priority order to reflect the current state of the architecture" (p. 14).
  • What changed in Rev C. "Revision C of the Architecture Definition Document adds two new technology gaps and removes one former gap, which has been replaced by multiple new architecture-driven data gaps" (p. 14):
  • For more, it points to "the 2024 architecture white paper or revision C" (p. 14). The 2024 paper is the ACR24 technology-gaps white paper, which gives Revision B's count as 56.

The gaps index has the details (How the list changes).

Deep Space Standards (p. 15)

"International standards help space agencies and aerospace companies from around the world collaborate in deep space. These standards — developed in collaboration with the international community and industry partners — define interfaces and environments to facilitate cooperative deep space exploration endeavors. These standards focus on priority topics for the early phases of exploration planning; they are not intended to dictate design features beyond interfaces" (p. 15). The page shows nine standards as badges, in two groups. The groups and adoption years were read from the PDF, because the text layer keeps only the headings:

Group, as printed Standards Adopted
"Moon to Mars Architecture Standards" Communications 2024
Avionics, Software, Power 2025
"Additional Gateway Standards" Rendezvous, Docking, Robotics, Life Support, Thermal no year shown

"NASA maintains a webpage that captures the standards adopted by NASA's Moon to Mars program and for Gateway, NASA's lunar-orbiting outpost. As the agency adopts new standards, they will appear on this page": https://www.nasa.gov/international-deep-space-standards/ (p. 15). That page is held: it lists the same nine in the same two groups, with "ECLSS" for "Life Support", and gives an adoption year only for Communications (the wiki's comparison; source page). See RT-7 Interoperability.

Architecture Performance & Effectiveness (p. 16)

NASA measures the architecture against its objectives with "measures of performance and measures of effectiveness". A chart, with no scale, compares the 2022 to 2025 reviews. Both are described on Architecture definition process.

The 2025 white papers (p. 17)

The Update describes six white papers, released "for awareness where more detailed rationale is available for key findings or decisions" (p. 3). All six are among the wiki's sources. The match between each title and its file was made by the wiki from the title on page 1 of each file. Two titles differ slightly. NASA's White Papers web page confirms the match: under "2025 Architecture Concept Review" it links all six files by the URLs in sources/manifest.csv (White Papers page, fetched 2026-10-01).

Title on p. 17 What it covers, in the Update's words (p. 17) Source file Wiki
"Why Moon and Mars? Building an Evolutionary Architecture" "how NASA is using an evolutionary crawl-walk-run approach to steadily build capabilities that can overcome the challenges of deep space exploration, expanding on the incremental approach the agency used to build up to the Apollo lunar landings" 2025-12-acr25-wp-why-moon-and-mars-v2 source page
"Architecture-Driven Planetary Protection Considerations" "NASA's approach to planetary protection, the process by which NASA safeguards both exploration destinations and the Earth from contamination, and highlights key considerations for human missions to Mars" ntrs-20250010949-ACR25-WP-Planetary-Protection source page
"Integrated Lunar Power Considerations" "the key factors that affect generating, storing, and sharing power on the lunar surface" ntrs-20250010948-ACR25-WP-Lunar-Power-Strategy (its title page reads "Integrated Lunar Power Strategy Considerations") source page
"Communications and Navigation Needs for Foundational Exploration" "how NASA's communications and navigation needs will expand beyond those of initial Artemis missions as it explores more of the lunar surface" ntrs-20250010953-ACR25-WP-FE-CPNT-v2 (its title page adds "the … Segment") source page
"Architecture Definition" "Updates two previous white papers to summarize the six major questions that make up an exploration architecture and how NASA defines the Moon to Mars Architecture to answer those questions" 2025-12-acr25-wp-architecture-definition-v3 source page
"Architecture-Driven Data Gaps" "the new catalog of architecture-driven data gaps, areas where NASA requires additional information to achieve its exploration goals" 2025-12-acr25-wp-data-gaps-v3 source page

The Update also cites two 2024 white papers: "Lunar Logistics and Mobility" (pp. 5, 9) and "Lunar Surface Cargo" (p. 9). The second is Lunar Surface Cargo. No file is titled "Lunar Logistics and Mobility", and NASA's White Papers page lists no paper by that name in any year. The nearest are Lunar Mobility Drivers and Needs, a 2024 paper on the same subject, and NASA's NextSTEP-2 "Appendix R: Lunar Logistics and Mobility Studies" solicitation, linked from the Industry Engagement page. The Appendix R page is a call for industry studies, not a paper; it names the 2024 cargo and mobility papers and the 2023 "Lunar Logistics Drivers and Needs" paper, but none titled "Lunar Logistics and Mobility" (source page). The wiki does not treat either as the paper the Update means (open question 30).

2026 Look-Ahead (p. 18)

  • "In 2026, NASA will continue to refine, update, and develop the Moon to Mars Architecture, adding elements that fulfill capabilities for future segments and conducting architecture definition tasks that bring the first human missions to Mars into focus. The agency will announce new industry engagement opportunities to leverage the capabilities of the commercial sector and will continue to partner with international space agencies to leverage their unique skills" (p. 18).
  • Focus areas for 2026: "lunar logistics capabilities, refining NASA's lunar power strategy, and examining the communications and navigation needs of crewed Mars missions" (p. 18).
  • Artemis II. "In 2026, NASA will launch Artemis II, the first mission to send astronauts around the Moon since the Apollo era." Its crew: "NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen". It "will pave the way for the next time astronauts walk on the lunar surface, during Artemis III" (p. 18).

Since then: Artemis II flew in April 2026 (Orion). The March 2026 fact sheet makes Artemis III an Earth-orbit test, with the first landing on Artemis IV in early 2028 (Going back to the Moon, pp. 1–2; open question 22).

What to know when using it

  • It is a summary, not a baseline document. It points to the ADD and the white papers for detail (pp. 3, 14). Where it adds something (the rover's rationale, the Mars crew reasoning, the standards by year, the performance chart), the wiki cites it.
  • It disagrees with the ADD on the Mars crew number. "Up to six" (Update, p. 13) against "no fewer than six" (ADD Rev C, pp. 76, 193). Same month, so the newer-wins rule doesn't settle it (Key definition tasks; open question 28).
  • It doesn't explain the ADD's "three new results" (ADD Rev C, p. 9). Its own list of 2025 developments, two elements, the data gaps and the crew range, is not a list of definition-task results, and it doesn't use the phrase (open question 21).
  • It predates the Moon Base and the February 2026 Artemis changes, as the ADD does.

Oddities

  • Two names for the fission element. The contents list "Lunar Nuclear Power System" (p. 2), and the page heading and table say "Lunar Nuclear Fission System" (p. 7). The ADD has the same split (its p. 31 against its p. 58; Elements).
  • A doubled word, carried over from the white paper: "As the list of data gaps list evolves or is addressed" (p. 11).
  • "no less than" and "no fewer than" for the same floor of four crew in one page (p. 13).
  • A stray capital: "For example, Recent NASA studies found …" (p. 13).
  • "DN-008L" without a space in the #0602 note (p. 14).

Extraction note

  • Checked against the PDF: pp. 1–2, 4–6, 9, 11, 13–16, 19.
  • p. 11: the text layer drops Figure One's labels and scrambles the four-row table. Both were read from the PDF.
  • p. 13: two columns that the text layer interleaves from mid-page on. Quotations follow the PDF.
  • p. 14: the "RECHARACTERIZED" stamp on #0602 extracts as scattered letters.
  • p. 15: the nine standard badges and the adoption years are images; only the group headings extract.
  • p. 16: the chart's axis labels extract only from the PDF image.
  • The text layer joins words broken across lines ("agencydeveloped", "semiautonomous", "architecturedriven"). Wiki quotations use the rendered, hyphenated form.
  • pp. 4, 6 and 19 are full-page images with no caption or text.

ADD Rev C · ACR25 data-gaps white paper · Elements · Lunar Utility Rover · Lunar Nuclear Fission System · Key definition tasks · Gaps index · Data gaps index · RT-7 Interoperability · Architecture definition process · Humans to Mars