NASA's Moon Base announcement on Saturday, November 7, was a package rather than one big award. Unveiled at the MAX POWER aerospace expo and air show at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA's release splits it into four parts: cargo landers, a nuclear-powered rover, transport between Earth and the Moon, and power hardware for the surface. Each covers a different stage of one job, getting equipment to the lunar South Pole before astronauts arrive.
"We are building the Moon Base mission by mission," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in the release.
The landers: eight companies, one $10 billion ceiling
The largest number belongs to the next phase of CLPS, or Commercial Lunar Payload Services, under which NASA buys lunar deliveries from companies that build and operate the landers.
NASA selected eight companies for the new CLPS 2 contract: Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, iSpace US, Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies. Selection makes them eligible to compete for future delivery missions under a 10-year contract with a combined maximum value of $10 billion. That is a ceiling on what NASA could spend, not money already committed.
The existing contract keeps running alongside it. NASA raised CLPS 1.0 from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion to cover early Moon Base work, and says it stays in place until November 2028, with deliveries already awarded allowed to finish by November 2033.
PROMISE: Mars rover hardware, sent to the Moon
The rover is the most unusual item. PROMISE stands for Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration. Isaacman announced it as a possible mission on June 30, Space.com reported, describing an engineering model, formerly called Optimism, that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory used to test fixes and commands before sending them to Curiosity and Perseverance on Mars.
NASA now says it is moving forward with development. JPL will manage the mission and build the six-wheeled rover from spare flight components and engineering test models for the two Mars rovers, which NASA says cuts cost and shortens integration and testing.
Power is the reason it matters. As Space.com explained in June, PROMISE runs on a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which turns heat from decaying radioactive material into electricity, while the other robots then planned for the Moon were solar powered. NASA says that lets PROMISE work through long lunar nights and inside permanently shadowed regions thought to hold ice.
The payload follows from that: a drill reaching about 1 meter (3 feet) below the surface, spectrometers, temperature and radiation sensors, cameras, and a demonstration of NASA's High Performance Spaceflight Computing system. Launch is targeted for late 2028, for an 18-month mission. Blue Origin has a $94 million base contract to deliver it on a Mark 1 lander, with a performance-based option worth $140 million more.
Getting cargo there
The transport piece answers a narrower question: how cargo gets from Earth orbit to where a lander can take it down. NASA awarded six task orders, worth about $1.3 billion combined, to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space under its VADR launch services contract.
They cover three mission types: delivering the CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft to test navigation and communications around the Moon, sending NASA's MoonFall drones to scout the South Pole ahead of crews, and demonstrating commercial orbital transfer in several orbits between Earth and the Moon. Some will launch on Blue Origin's New Glenn, Relativity Space's Terran R and SpaceX's Falcon 9.
Separately, SpaceX will launch communications satellites to cislunar space on a Starship in 2028, under an existing lunar logistics contract.
Power on the surface
The last piece is smaller. For a Mini-Communications and Solar Tower called miniCAST, NASA picked Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company, for energy storage, Redwire for power generation and Yank Technologies for wireless power transfer. NASA says this first effort buys components rather than an integrated system, and expects to seek fully integrated power systems in early 2027.
The next milestones follow from that order. NASA expects miniCAST work to begin within months, the CLPS 2 companies are eligible for missions NASA hasn't yet assigned, and SpaceX's Starship demonstration and the PROMISE launch both sit in 2028.
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