NASA has unveiled the biggest single push yet toward a permanent American outpost on the Moon, naming eight companies — including SpaceX and Blue Origin — to compete for lunar cargo deliveries under a contract framework worth up to $10 billion. Announced Saturday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it also advances a nuclear-powered rover for the Moon's South Pole, launch and transport orders worth about $1.3 billion, and the power and communications systems a sustained lunar base will need.
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| NASA photo: Craters near the Moon's South Pole, where NASA plans to build its sustained lunar base. (NASA/LRO) |
The package accelerates NASA's Moon Base program — its plan for a lasting human presence at the lunar South Pole and a stepping stone to Mars. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency is "building the Moon Base mission by mission" and that when astronauts return to the Moon, "they will arrive with the first elements of the Moon Base already waiting for them on the surface."
The South Pole is the focus because of what may be hidden in its permanently shadowed craters: water ice. That ice, if confirmed in usable quantities, could one day supply drinking water, breathable oxygen and even rocket propellant for crews living far from Earth. No American astronaut has walked on the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972, and NASA's Artemis program is built around changing that, starting with the South Pole.
The $10 Billion Cargo Framework
At the heart of Saturday's announcement is the next phase of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, known as CLPS 2. Under the new framework, eight companies will be eligible to compete for future lunar surface delivery missions: Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies.
The CLPS 2 contract is a 10-year, multiple-award framework with a combined maximum value of $10 billion. That figure is a ceiling for future task orders, not money handed out now — the companies will compete for individual delivery jobs, managing, building and operating the landers that carry NASA payloads to the surface.
NASA also raised the current CLPS 1.0 ceiling from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion to support the initial phase of its Moon Base objectives. That contract remains in place through November 2028, with five more years to complete awarded deliveries through November 2033.
Under CLPS, private companies own the landers and the flights, and NASA buys delivery as a service — a model already tested: Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost landed successfully in March 2025 and Intuitive Machines' Odysseus reached the surface in February 2024. The new framework turns that experiment into a standing freight network for a permanent base. Moon Base Program manager Carlos García-Galán said the agency has moved fast: "In the eight months since Ignition, we've made incredible strides in accomplishing the near impossible: establishing a permanent outpost on the lunar surface."
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| Illustration: Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, which will deliver NASA's nuclear-powered PROMISE rover to the Moon's South Pole. (Blue Origin) |
A Nuclear-Powered Rover for the South Pole
The most technically ambitious piece of the announcement is PROMISE, a six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover that NASA is moving forward with for the Moon's South Pole. Its full name — Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration — describes its job: to map the surface and subsurface, assess resources, and provide the data NASA needs to choose landing sites and plan future infrastructure.
Because it is nuclear-powered, PROMISE can keep working through the long lunar nights and inside the permanently shadowed craters where sunlight never reaches — the darkest parts of the South Pole, and exactly the places solar-powered rovers cannot survive.
The rover will carry a drill to extract lunar dust from about 3 feet (1 meter) below the surface, spectrometers to analyze surface material, temperature and radiation sensors, and visible-light cameras. It will also demonstrate a next-generation, radiation-tolerant computing system — NASA's High Performance Spaceflight Computing — and advanced autonomy sensors and algorithms.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, a division of Caltech, will manage the mission and build the rover from spare flight components and engineering test models from the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers. Using proven Mars rover hardware and software significantly reduces cost and shortens the timeline, the agency said.
NASA is targeting a late 2028 launch for PROMISE and an 18-month mission. Blue Origin won a $94 million base contract, with a $140 million performance option, to deliver the rover to the South Pole using its Mark 1 lander. The award expands a May 2026 task order to deliver two lunar terrain vehicles to the Moon.
Building the Freight Network
Getting cargo to the Moon will require more than landers. NASA also awarded six task orders worth approximately $1.3 billion combined to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space to integrate and transport Moon Base cargo under its Venture-Class launch services contract.
The awards cover three types of missions: one to test communications, navigation and in-space transportation on the journey from Earth orbit to the Moon, including delivering the CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft to deep space; a second to send highly mobile drones, including NASA's MoonFall drones, to survey the South Pole before astronauts arrive; and a third to test navigation and operations in multiple orbits between Earth and the Moon, demonstrating commercial transfer systems that could let future landers carry more cargo.
Some of the missions will launch aboard Blue Origin's New Glenn, Relativity Space's Terran R and SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets, with in-space transportation spacecraft provided by Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Impulse Space and Quantum Space.
Separately, NASA selected SpaceX for a Cislunar Communications Deployment Demonstration under an existing lunar logistics contract. SpaceX will launch communications satellites aboard a Starship to the region between Earth and the Moon in 2028, to test future lunar communications networks.
Power and Communications on the Surface
A base that must survive two-week lunar nights also needs power and communications on the ground, and NASA announced awards for that as well. The agency plans to purchase commercial components for a Mini-Communications and Solar Tower, known as miniCAST, combining power and communications capabilities to support future Moon Base activities.
Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company, was awarded work on energy storage, Redwire on power generation, and Yank Technologies on wireless power transfer. Engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, will assemble and test the systems before delivery to the lunar surface. NASA expects work to begin within months, with a separate solicitation for fully integrated power systems in early 2027.
What This Means
Saturday's announcement moves NASA from plans to procurement. The Moon Base program is no longer a concept paper or a single flagship mission; it is now a set of funded contracts, with named companies, dollar ceilings and delivery dates attached to every part of the effort.
It also shows how NASA intends to build the base: by buying services from American companies rather than owning every vehicle itself. The $10 billion CLPS 2 ceiling creates a decade-long market for commercial lunar delivery, giving all eight companies a reason to invest in landers NASA alone could not justify funding.
There are risks, of course. No CLPS 2 lander has flown yet, the existing CLPS record includes both successes and failures, and the 2028 dates for PROMISE and the Starship communications demonstration assume development proceeds on schedule — something lunar programs have rarely managed. And the $10 billion is a ceiling, not a spend: the actual money depends on how many missions NASA orders and how well the companies perform.
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| Illustration: SpaceX's Starship on the lunar surface. NASA selected SpaceX to launch communications satellites to cislunar space in 2028. (SpaceX/CBS News) |
What Happens Next
Work on the miniCAST components is expected to begin within months, with a separate solicitation for fully integrated power systems in early 2027. The first visible milestones will be the transport demonstration missions under the $1.3 billion in launch orders, including the CAPSTONE 02 mission and the MoonFall drone surveys of the South Pole.
Further out, the calendar points to 2028, when Blue Origin is to deliver the PROMISE rover aboard its Mark 1 lander for an 18-month mission, and SpaceX is to fly communications satellites to cislunar space aboard Starship. Beyond those dates, NASA says Artemis astronauts will fly increasingly difficult missions to the lunar South Pole — building, piece by piece, on the foundation for the first crewed mission to Mars. As Isaacman put it, the agency is "using the playbook that carried NASA through its greatest eras: fly often, learn, apply those lessons, and get more better and more capable with every mission."
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