NASA announced up to $10 billion in contracts on Saturday to support lunar cargo deliveries and other initiatives as it moves ahead with plans to build a moon base for astronauts by 2032.
The announcements, made during the agency’s “Max Power” event at Kennedy Space Center, included a new $10 billion Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) framework, dubbed CLPS 2; approximately $1.3 billion in funding for the agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) program; and plans for a nuclear-powered lunar rover called PROMISE.
The announcements come as NASA aims to establish infrastructure on the Moon, including rovers, cargo systems and research equipment, before Artemis astronauts return to its surface.
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“Under the current CLPS contract, it’s all or nothing, which might be fine if you’re only doing one or two of those [missions] per year,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told Space.com during a press conference on Saturday. “But when you’re trying to scale up to what we’re talking about today, you want to have the flexibility to move pieces around.”
NASA selected eight companies to compete for missions under the new CLPS 2 framework. They include Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies.
“We are building the Moon Base mission by mission,” Isaacman said in a statement. “When our astronauts return to the Moon, they will arrive with the first elements of the Moon Base already waiting for them on the surface.”
NASA also increased the maximum value of its existing CLPS contract from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion to support the initial phase of its lunar base plans.
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The agency is also following through on a proposal Isaacman made in June to repurpose an engineering model of the Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers into a mission-ready vehicle for lunar exploration.
The rover, called PROMISE (short for “Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration”), is a nuclear-powered robotic vehicle intended to explore the lunar south pole beginning in late 2028.
The autonomous rover will carry a drill and scientific instruments to search for volatiles and water ice on the lunar surface. NASA awarded Blue Origin a $94 million base contract, with an additional $140 million option based on performance, to deliver PROMISE to the Moon aboard its Blue Moon Mark 1 lander.