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NASA Unveils New Plans for Lunar Base Construction and Nuclear-Powered Rover Launch as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Other...
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NASA announced on Saturday local time its latest plan to work with U.S. companies to expand the exploration, research, and infrastructure-construction capabilities of its lunar base project and to achieve a long-term presence at the lunar south pole. The plan covers commercial robotic cargo delivery, the PROMISE nuclear-powered lunar rover, launch and orbital transfer services, and lunar surface infrastructure. NASA said the related funding will be used to advance a series of commercial lunar missions.
On cargo landers, NASA selected eight companiesâBlue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace U.S., Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX, and Voyager Technologiesâto enter the next stage of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. They will compete for future lunar surface delivery missions under the new CLPS 2 contract framework. CLPS 2 runs for 10 years, allows multiple awards, and has a total contract ceiling of $10 billion; NASA also raised the CLPS 1.0 contract ceiling from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion.
NASA also announced it is advancing development of the PROMISE nuclear-powered lunar rover. The six-wheeled rover will land at the lunar south pole to survey the lunar surface and subsurface stratigraphy, assess resource potential, and provide data for landing-site selection and subsequent infrastructure construction. It can operate through the long lunar night and inside permanently shadowed craters, which are believed to contain water ice. NASA plans to launch PROMISE in late 2028, with a design mission duration of 18 months.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California will be responsible for PROMISE mission management and rover development. The rover extensively reuses spare flight components and engineering test models from the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers to reduce costs and shorten the integration and testing cycle. PROMISE is equipped with drilling equipment that can detect water ice and other resources about 1 meter below the surface, and it carries spectrometers, temperature and radiation sensors, and visible-light cameras.
NASA awarded Blue Origin a contract with a base value of $94 million, plus performance incentive options worth up to an additional $140 million, to deliver PROMISE to the lunar south pole. This award expands a May 2026 task order that originally covered delivering two lunar terrain vehicles to the Moon. Blue Origin will use its Mark 1 lander to deploy the rover under the framework of lunar base Phase 1.
Building a lunar base requires a stable Earth-Moon transportation network. Under the VADR framework, NASA issued six task orders to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin, and Impulse Space to complete lunar base cargo integration and deep-space transfer. The three types of missions will respectively validate cislunar communications, navigation, and orbital transfer capabilities; pre-deploy drones to survey the lunar south pole; and test navigation technology and demonstrate commercial orbital transfer solutions. These task orders are worth approximately $1.3 billion in total and fall under the 10-year VADR contract, which has a total ceiling of $5 billion. Some missions will be launched on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, Relativity Space's Terran R rocket, and SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
For lunar surface infrastructure, NASA plans to procure commercial components to build a small communications and solar tower (miniCAST), including solar arrays, energy-storage batteries, and wireless power transmission hardware. NASA has awarded Blue Origin subsidiary Honeybee Robotics to supply energy-storage equipment, Redwire to supply power-generation modules, and Yank Technologies to supply wireless power transmission technology. The equipment will first be assembled and tested by engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center and then sent to the lunar surface. NASA also plans to issue a targeted solicitation under NextSTEP-3B to fill high-priority data gaps in the development of the lunar base architecture. NASA said Artemis program astronauts will carry out missions of progressively increasing difficulty to the lunar south pole and pave the way for the first crewed mission to Mars.
