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NASA planning for the human space flight frontier is coming into alignment with the goals of other planetary-capable national space agencies and independent commercial actors. US Space Policy Directive 1 made this shift explicit: "the United States will lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization". The stage is now set for public and private American investment in a wide range of lunar activities. Assumptions about Moon base architectures and operations are likely to drive the invention of requirements that will in turn govern development of systems, commercial-services purchase agreements, and priorities for technology investment. Yet some fundamental architecture-shaping lessons already captured in the literature are not clearly being used as drivers, and remain absent from typical treatments of lunar base concepts. A prime example is general failure to recognize that most of the time (i.e., before and between intermittent human occupancy), a Moon base must be robotic: most of the activity, most of the time, must be implemented by robot agents rather than astronauts. This paper reviews key findings of a seminal robotic-base design-operations analysis commissioned by NASA in 1989. It discusses implications of these lessons for today's Moon Village and SPD-1 paradigms: exploration by multiple actors; public-private partnership development and operations; cislunar infrastructure; production-quantity exploitation of volatile resources near the poles to bootstrap further space activities; autonomy capability that was frontier in 1989 but now routine within terrestrial industry. It outlines new work underway to close these gaps; and articulates conclusions that can guide future work. • Most of the time, most of a Moon base is robotic. • Base elements designed for robotic operations challenge conventional concepts. • Hierarchical supervisory control is essential. Full autonomy is not. • All known base functions can be emplaced completely robotically. • A habitable, oxygen-producing base can be constructed in less than four years of quarterly flights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]