NASA picks eight companies for lunar cargo deliveries, orders nuclear rover

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER · NASA has chosen eight private companies to compete for a decade of cargo deliveries to the Moon under a new contract with a maximum value of $10 billion. The agency also ordered a nuclear-powered rover to explore the lunar South Pole, with a launch targeted for late 2028. Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the awards Saturday at the MAX POWER aerospace expo in Florida. The package includes landers, launches, communications demonstrations and surface power hardware for NASA's Moon Base program.

The new contract, called CLPS 2, replaces the existing Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. It is structured as an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract, meaning NASA will order missions individually from the pool of eight providers over the next ten years. The selected companies are Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies. NASA also increased the funding ceiling for the first CLPS contract to $4.2 billion to support the initial phase of Moon Base.

The Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration, or PROMISE, will be assembled by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory using spare parts from the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers. It will be powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, a nuclear battery that converts heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. This allows it to operate during the two-week lunar night and explore permanently shadowed craters where water ice may exist. "Having a nuclear battery on it allows us to go anywhere we want, regardless of the illumination," said Carlos Garcia-Galan, NASA's Moon Base program manager, in a June statement.

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The rover's scientific payload includes a one-metre drill built by Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin subsidiary, along with several spectrometers, a radiation detector and a navigation laser reflector. Four of these instruments are also used on NASA's VIPER rover. Blue Origin will deliver PROMISE to the Moon on its Mark 1 lander under a $94 million base contract, with potential for an additional $140 million based on performance. This expands a previous task order Blue Origin secured in May to transport NASA's lunar terrain vehicles.

NASA also awarded six launch task orders worth approximately $1.3 billion to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space. These missions, which include deep-space test flights and South Pole surveys using drones, will fly on rockets including Blue Origin's New Glenn, Relativity Space's Terran R and SpaceX's Falcon 9. Separately, SpaceX will launch lunar communications satellites aboard a Starship in 2028 under an existing logistics contract. For surface power, NASA selected Honeybee Robotics, Redwire and Yank Technologies to develop a small solar tower system.

Canadian technology has already flown on landers operated by two of the selected companies. Canadensys Aerospace hardware was aboard the Intuitive Machines Odysseus mission in February 2024, and coatings from Markham's Integrity Testing Laboratory flew on a Firefly lander in March 2025. Each future CLPS 2 mission represents another opportunity for Canadian instruments. The Canadian Space Agency cancelled its own small lunar rover project in March due to federal budget cuts, a mission that was to use a Canadensys rover on a Firefly lander in 2029.

Instead, the federal government has allocated $1.2 billion over 13 years for a larger Lunar Utility Vehicle to support astronauts, with a launch no earlier than 2033. Canadensys, MDA Space and Mission Control are conducting concept studies for that project. The government has committed $1.68 billion to the Lunar Gateway and Canadarm3 program, which represents 91 percent of its total Moon program funding since 2019. NASA has stated the Gateway program is currently "paused," but Canada remains committed to adapting Canadarm3 for lunar surface operations. NASA plans to solicit proposals for integrated surface power systems in early 2027 and will seek additional data about potential Moon Base sites from commercial providers. "When our astronauts return to the Moon, they will arrive with the first elements of the Moon Base already waiting for them on the surface," Isaacman said. The extent of Canadian involvement in building that base will be determined mission by mission over the coming decade.

With files from SpaceQ