Dhaka, March 25 -- NASA announced on Tuesday it has cancelled plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and will instead use components from the project to build a $20 billion base on the moon's surface, while also planning to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars.

US space agency chief Jared Isaacman, an appointee of President Donald Trump who took charge at NASA in December, announced an unprecedented array of changes to the Artemis moon programme that would expand humanity's footprint in space, as the US pushes to return to the moon before China sends its astronauts there around 2030.

The plans for the moon base included an aim to send more robotic landers, deploy a fleet of drones and lay the groundwork for using nuclear po...