First Lunar Outpost Habitat

FLO

Mission Profile

First Lunar Outpost Habitat (FLO) was a NASA concept from the early 1990s for a large human-tended lunar outpost that would have served as America's first permanent presence on the Moon, studied as part of the Space Exploration Initiative that President Bush announced in 1989. The FLO concept centered on a large habitation module delivered to the lunar surface by an expendable heavy-lift vehicle (Comet HLLV) and designed for continuous four-person crew rotations lasting 180 days at a polar lunar site with access to potential water ice resources. Estimated costs in the range of $100 billion over 20 years made FLO politically untenable and the entire Space Exploration Initiative was defunded by Congress in 1992, but FLO's technical work directly informed the Constellation program's lunar outpost planning in the 2000s.