NASA has unveiled a sweeping package of Moon Base awards, including a $10 billion commercial cargo contract and a nuclear-powered rover that will hunt for ice at the lunar South Pole, with a launch targeted for late 2028.
A mosaic of the Moon's South Pole from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech (public domain)
A $10 Billion Bet on Commercial Moon Deliveries
NASA announced the awards on Saturday, November 7, at the MAX POWER aerospace expo and air show at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The package is part of what the agency calls its Moon Base effort: building a sustained human presence near the lunar South Pole with the help of American industry.
The centerpiece is CLPS 2, the successor to NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. It is a 10-year, multiple-award contract with a combined maximum value of $10 billion, under which eight companies are now eligible to compete for cargo runs to the lunar surface: Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace US, Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX, and Voyager Technologies. Per-mission cargo capacity will rise to between 2 and 6 tons. The $10 billion figure is a ceiling for future task orders, not money already handed out.
The original CLPS contract will remain in place through November 2028, with an additional five-year period to complete awarded lunar deliveries through November 2033. NASA also announced six launch and in-space transport orders and a solar-and-communications tower for the lunar surface.
PROMISE: A Nuclear Rover Built to Survive the Lunar Night
The most striking project in the package is PROMISE, short for Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration. The six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover will land at the Moon's South Pole to map the surface and subsurface, assess resources, and gather data to help choose landing sites for future infrastructure and exploration.
Its nuclear power source, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, is the key to the mission. It will let PROMISE keep working through the roughly 14-Earth-day lunar night and inside permanently shadowed craters thought to harbor ice, conditions where a solar-powered rover would go dark. That endurance is crucial for a sustained human presence on the Moon, NASA said.
The rover will carry a drill to extract regolith, or lunar dust, from about 1 meter (3 feet) below the surface to characterize ice and other resources, along with spectrometers to analyze the chemical composition of surface material, temperature and radiation sensors, and visible-light cameras.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will manage the mission and build the rover from spare flight components and engineering test models left over from the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers, a choice meant to cut cost and testing time. NASA awarded Blue Origin a $94 million base contract, with a performance-based option worth a further $140 million, to deliver PROMISE to the South Pole aboard its Mark 1 lander. NASA is targeting late 2028 to launch the rover on an 18-month mission.
Why the South Pole Matters
The lunar South Pole has become the focus of the new space race because its shadowed craters are believed to hold water ice. That ice could be turned into drinking water, oxygen, and even rocket fuel, making a long-term outpost far more practical than one that must import everything from Earth.
PROMISE is designed to scout for those Moon Base operations while prospecting for resources. Its findings will feed into NASA's Artemis program, with Artemis III slated for early 2027 to test two potential landers, Blue Origin's Blue Moon and a version of SpaceX's Starship, and Artemis IV planned in 2028 to return humans to the Moon. Both landers remain unproven, an issue NASA's Office of Inspector General has previously raised, and lunar schedules have often slipped in the past — so the 2028 target is a plan, not a promise.
Still, Saturday's announcement is the clearest signal yet of how NASA intends to get to a permanent lunar presence: not with a single government-built system, but with a marketplace of commercial landers competing for delivery missions, and a hardy nuclear rover leading the way into the dark.
Source: NASA.