NASA picked eight companies for up to $10 billion in Moon cargo flights over 10 years

NASA has selected eight companies for a 10-year contract worth up to $10 billion to land cargo on the Moon. The agency announced the awards on Nov. 7 at the MAX POWER expo at Kennedy Space Center, as part of a package of Moon Base work aimed at the lunar South Pole.

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The eight are Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, iSpace U.S., Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies. None is guaranteed a flight yet. Each becomes eligible to compete for future delivery missions.

CLPS 2: a $10 billion ceiling shared by eight

The vehicle is a multiple-award, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity master contract known as CLPS 2, a follow-on to the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. NASA’s release on the Moon Base awards sets the combined maximum value at $10 billion over 10 years. Because the structure is indefinite-quantity, that figure is a ceiling on what NASA can order across all eight companies, not money committed to any one lander.

The agency also raised the value of the original contract, now described as CLPS 1.0, from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion. That contract runs through November 2028, with an additional five years allowed to finish deliveries already awarded, through November 2033. Together the two vehicles make the commercial lander program the main route for putting instruments and supplies on the surface.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman framed the announcement as incremental, saying in the release that the agency is building the Moon Base mission by mission and wants to fly often, learn from each flight and apply the lessons. Moon Base Program manager Carlos Garcia-Galan said the program has consolidated its efforts and is now awarding new contracts and partnerships about eight months after a milestone the agency calls Ignition.

The mix of awardees spans very different kinds of firms. Blue Origin, SpaceX and Lockheed Martin Space are large launch and spacecraft builders, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines have already built landers for earlier CLPS deliveries, and Northrop Grumman Space Systems, Voyager Technologies and iSpace U.S. add further options for how a given payload reaches the surface. Because each order is competed among the eight, NASA can match a mission to a lander rather than commit to one design.

PROMISE: a nuclear-powered rover on a Blue Origin lander

The largest single task in the package is a rover. The Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration, or PROMISE, is a six-wheeled, nuclear-powered vehicle designed to work through long lunar nights and in permanently shadowed regions that may hold ice. NASA targets a late 2028 launch for an 18-month mission.

The rover carries a drill that reaches about one meter below the surface, spectrometers, temperature and radiation sensors, cameras, NASA’s High Performance Spaceflight Computing and autonomy sensors. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory will manage the mission and build the vehicle largely from spare parts and test models left over from the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers.

Blue Origin received a $94 million base award, with up to $140 million more in performance-based options, to deliver PROMISE using its Mark 1 lander. The award is separate from the cargo contract, but it ties the two together: that makes one of the eight CLPS 2 companies the named carrier of a flagship surface asset.

The release also describes a directed call under the NextSTEP-3 B effort to fill high-priority data gaps for Moon Base development. Possible work includes small spacecraft, payloads on future flights, or purchased commercial data. Read together with the Moon Base program awards, it shows the agency buying information and transportation as separate services rather than owning the whole stack.

VADR launch orders and the rest of the Moon Base package

Alongside the landers, NASA issued six task orders worth about $1.3 billion to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space. They sit under a 10-year launch and in-space transportation contract with a $5 billion maximum, and they cover deep-space tests of communications, navigation and orbital transfer, including the CAPSTONE 02 mission, and drone surveys of the South Pole by JPL’s MoonFall drones before astronauts arrive.

The launch rockets named for that work are Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Relativity Space’s Terran R and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. In-space transport comes from Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Impulse Space and Quantum Space.

SpaceX will also launch communications satellites on Starship to cislunar space in 2028 under a lunar logistics contract. For power, NASA will buy commercial pieces of a mini-communications and solar tower: Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company, for energy storage, Redwire for power generation and Yank Technologies for wireless power transfer, with Marshall Space Flight Center assembling and testing them. A solicitation for fully integrated power systems is expected in early 2027.

What remains unknown is how much of the $10 billion ceiling will ever be ordered. The release names no CLPS 2 landing missions or dates, so the first task orders will show which of the eight companies the agency actually trusts with cargo.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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