NASA lines up eight Moon lander firms for $10 billion and a nuclear rover
NASA named eight companies for CLPS 2, a contract worth up to $10 billion, and gave Blue Origin $94 million to land PROMISE, a six-wheeled nuclear-powered rover, at the lunar south pole.
NASA on Saturday named eight companies for CLPS 2, a lunar delivery contract worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. It also moved ahead with PROMISE, a six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover for the Moon’s south pole, and gave Blue Origin a $94 million base contract to land it, NASA said.
The agency announced the package at the MAX POWER aerospace expo and air show at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said:
“We are building the Moon Base mission by mission.”
Eight lander firms, and a bigger version of the old contract
CLPS stands for Commercial Lunar Payload Services, NASA’s program of buying rides to the Moon from private companies instead of building its own landers. Under CLPS 2, specialists such as Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines join Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems and SpaceX, along with Blue Origin, ispace US and Voyager Technologies. All eight can now bid for individual delivery missions. Each winner would build, launch and operate a lander carrying NASA science, technology and infrastructure payloads.
The contract is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity type. That means NASA commits to no set number of missions up front, so the $10 billion is a ceiling, not a spending plan. The first contract, CLPS 1.0, was raised from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion to cover the first phase of the Moon Base. It stays open for new orders through November 2028, and deliveries already awarded can run until November 2033.
PROMISE: A Mars rover’s spare parts for the lunar night
PROMISE is short for Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration. It will land near the south pole, where some craters never see sunlight and are thought to hold ice. A nuclear power source lets it work through the long lunar nights and inside those shadowed regions, where solar panels would be useless.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will build the rover from spare flight parts and engineering test models left over from the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers. NASA says this cuts cost and shortens the schedule, and that it has checked the hardware can tolerate conditions near the south pole. Those two machines are covered in our look at the Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers.
The rover will carry a drill that reaches about 3 feet (1 meter) below the surface to sample regolith, the loose lunar dust and rock, and test it for ice and other resources. It will also carry spectrometers to read the chemical makeup of the surface, temperature and radiation sensors and visible-light cameras. It will test NASA’s High Performance Spaceflight Computing, a radiation-tolerant computer, along with autonomy sensors and software. Launch is targeted for late 2028, followed by an 18-month mission. Blue Origin’s option period adds up to $140 million based on performance, and its Mark 1 lander will carry the rover.
Freight trucks to orbit: $1.3 billion in transport orders
NASA also placed six task orders worth about $1.3 billion combined under its VADR launch contract, whose maximum total value across all contracts is $5 billion. Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space won them. They cover orbital transfer vehicles, which NASA likens to long-distance freight trucks that carry cargo between Earth orbit and the Moon while landers handle the final descent.
The missions fall into three types: testing communications and navigation on the way to the Moon, including the CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft; scouting the south pole with MoonFall drones before astronauts arrive; and testing navigation in several orbits between Earth and the Moon. Rockets named for the flights are Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Relativity Space’s Terran R and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Separately, SpaceX will launch communications satellites on a Starship to cislunar space (the region between Earth and the Moon) in 2028.
On the surface, NASA is buying parts for miniCAST, a small tower combining power and communications. Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company, will supply energy storage, Redwire power generation and Yank Technologies wireless power transfer. NASA plans a separate call for fully integrated power systems in early 2027.
Where the money goes, and who is left holding it
Add up the figures and the Moon Base is being bought from a small circle of firms. Blue Origin appears in the CLPS 2 pool, holds the PROMISE delivery, is among the VADR winners and owns Honeybee Robotics, which is paid for miniCAST storage. NASA gave Blue Origin the PROMISE order by expanding a task order from May 2026 for two lunar terrain vehicles.
The ceiling is also a big step up from where CLPS started. NASA’s CLPS page says 17 lunar deliveries have been awarded to five vendors, carrying more than 60 payloads, from a pool of 13 eligible American companies under a $2.6 billion cap. CLPS 2 narrows the pool to eight firms but raises the cap almost fourfold. That tilts the program toward companies that can carry out bigger or more frequent landings, though the real cost will depend on the orders NASA places.
Spending on links around the Moon is growing too. We reported that NASA picked three firms for up to $1.07 billion to replace aging relay satellites, a separate effort to keep spacecraft connected. The Moon Base campaign adds demand for such links, which is why the SpaceX Starship communications demonstration matters.
NASA says work on miniCAST is expected to begin within months and that the first effort will involve components, not a full integrated system. Dates for the CLPS 2 missions have not been set, and launches that fly on these contracts will appear on the rocket launch schedule once they are dated.
