Applying lessons learned from the Apollo program (and in the intervening years) to establish an ongoing presence on the Moon will truly establish America as a space-faring nation, as originally intended when Kennedy made the commitment. Learning how to operate in that extremely challenging environment long-term will pave the way for in-depth exploration of Mars and asteroids. This will be an opportunity to dramatically improve the state of the art for autonomous systems, particularly their efficient (minimum resource) use for autonomic functions (environment/actuator interface) for real-tome reconfigurable and manageable housing, transportation, life support, power production, manufacturing, environmental monitoring, resource extraction and management. The next generation exploration will thus involve using the moon and cislunar space as permanent and semi-permanent ‘platforms’ for many activities requiring full-scale reconnaissance. These include the expansion of the communication, navigation, transportation, industrial, and exploration infrastructure for the Earth Moon system and the development of a proving ground for autonomous operations beyond the Earth Moon system but with the ‘fail safe’ option of ‘real time’. Until recently, the Moon itself had been largely neglected by the NASA as being the bailiwick of resource intensive human exploration. The serendipitous discovery of water on the lunar surface led to renewed interest in the Moon, reexamination of existing lunar data, implementation of new missions to the Moon and strategic shift in viewing the Moon as the new ‘high ground’. NASA is currently supporting working groups to develop and utilize advanced technologies for use on the lunar surface through the Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative.