NASA names eight firms to a $10B lunar delivery deal and picks Blue Origin for a nuclear rover
NASA selected eight companies for CLPS 2, a 10-year lunar delivery contract with a $10B ceiling, and gave Blue Origin a $94M base award to land the nuclear-powered PROMISE rover at the Moon's south pole.
NASA has named eight companies to a new lunar delivery contract with a $10 billion ceiling and picked Blue Origin to land a nuclear-powered rover at the Moon's south pole, the agency said in a November 7 announcement at the MAX POWER expo at Kennedy Space Center. The package also includes about $1.3 billion in launch and in-space transport task orders for Moon Base cargo.
Eight landers, one ceiling
The new contract, CLPS 2, is a 10-year, multiple-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity vehicle for Commercial Lunar Payload Services, NASA's program of buying lunar deliveries from private companies. The eight selected firms are Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies. They are eligible to compete for individual delivery missions; the $10 billion figure is a combined maximum value, not money awarded up front, as Space.com noted.
NASA also raised the ceiling on the existing CLPS 1.0 contract from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion to cover the first phase of the Moon Base campaign. The original contract stays in place through November 2028, with a further five years to finish awarded deliveries, through November 2033. Administrator Jared Isaacman told Space.com that the current all-or-nothing structure might work for one or two missions a year, but that a larger cadence needs the flexibility to move pieces around.
PROMISE: a Mars-rover spare on the Moon
NASA is moving ahead with PROMISE, the Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration. The six-wheeled rover will be built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory from spare flight components and engineering test models for the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers. NASA says reusing proven hardware, software and operating methods lowers cost and shortens the schedule, and that it has assessed the hardware as able to tolerate conditions near the south pole.
A nuclear power source lets the rover work through the long lunar night and inside permanently shadowed regions thought to hold ice, where solar power would not work. It will carry a drill to sample regolith from about one meter (three feet) down, spectrometers to read the chemical makeup of the surface, temperature and radiation sensors and visible-light cameras. It will also fly NASA's High Performance Spaceflight Computing system, a radiation-tolerant computer, along with new autonomy sensors and algorithms. NASA is targeting a late-2028 launch and an 18-month mission.
Blue Origin received a $94 million base contract, plus a $140 million performance-based option, to deliver PROMISE on its Mark 1 lander. The award expands a task order from May 2026 to deliver two lunar terrain vehicles; Venture Block covered NASA's earlier restructuring of Artemis around Blue Moon.
Freight, drones and a power tower
Six task orders under NASA's Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract, worth roughly $1.3 billion combined, went to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space. NASA describes orbital transfer vehicles as long-distance freight trucks that carry large loads across space, leaving landers to handle the final descent. The missions fall into three groups: tests of communications and navigation between Earth orbit and the Moon, including delivery of the CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft; a set of highly mobile MoonFall drones to scout the south pole ahead of astronauts; and demonstrations of navigation and operations in several cislunar orbits. Launches are planned on Blue Origin's New Glenn, Relativity Space's Terran R and SpaceX's Falcon 9, with in-space vehicles from Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Impulse Space and Quantum Space.
Separately, SpaceX will launch communications satellites on a Starship to cislunar space in 2028 under an existing lunar logistics contract. NASA also plans to buy components for a Mini-Communications and Solar Tower, or miniCAST: Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company, for energy storage, Redwire for power generation and Yank Technologies for wireless power transfer. NASA says work should begin within months and will involve components rather than a major integrated system, with a separate solicitation for fully integrated power systems expected in early 2027.
What it means for space companies
Space.com reported that the awards support a Phase One Moon Base strategy that runs through 2029 and centers on robotic exploration, infrastructure demonstrations and commercial deliveries, followed by a build-out phase from 2029 to 2032. For the eight CLPS 2 firms, the contract is a licence to bid rather than a revenue commitment, so the near-term money sits in the specific task orders: the Blue Origin rover delivery and the VADR flights. The sector's private funding has been active as well; Venture Block recently reported that Northwood Space raised $375 million to scale its satellite ground network.
NASA said it intends to release a directed NextSTEP-3 B call to fill high-priority data gaps for Moon Base planning, and it expects the integrated power solicitation in early 2027.
