Overview
- NASA announced on June 30, 2026 that it selected Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines for four CLPS lander missions valued at about $590 million with deliveries targeted for late 2028.
- Each mission will carry three identical NASA payloads: SCALPSS, a stereo camera array that images lander plumes and dust; a Laser Retroreflector Array to help precise surface navigation; and LETS, a detector that measures radiation energy hitting the surface.
- The agency will soon seek more commercial proposals for additional landers, technology demonstrations, a South Pole optical imager, and a lunar communications and navigation relay to build a distributed network of environmental and positioning data.
- NASA is studying repurposing PROMISE, an RTG‑powered engineering model of Mars rovers, for south‑pole work that could survive long lunar nights, but that option faces limits because RTG units are scarce and needed by other missions.
- Program managers say the awards are part of a phased, decade‑scale Moon Base plan using CLPS as the commercial backbone and that schedule risk from Blue Origin’s May New Glenn pad explosion and past mixed CLPS results will be managed with contingency launch options and iterative design improvements.