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NASA unveils $10 billion in moon base contracts, new lunar missions and the 'PROMISE' of a nuclear-powered rover
The new contracts aim to pave the way for a permanent moon base.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA is pushing ahead with its plan to build a moon base for astronauts by 2032, with the agency unveiling up to $10 billion in contracts to launch and deliver cargo to the moon and other efforts on Saturday (Nov. 7).
The NASA announcement, revealed here during the space agency's "Max Power" air show event at Kennedy Space Center, included plans for a new $10 billion Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) framework, dubbed CLPS 2, about$1.3 billion in funding for the agency's Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) program, and the nuclear-powered "PROMISE" rover on the moon.
The announcements mark another step in NASA's effort to establish infrastructure on the moon before Artemis astronauts return to its surface, including a rover and other cargo and research elements.
"Under the current CLPS contract, it's all 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 the new CLPS 2 missions under the framework: Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies.
The contracts for the 10-year CLPS 2 architecture carry a combined maximum value of $10 billion, rather than $10 billion in immediately awarded missions. NASA also increased the ceiling of its existing CLPS contract from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion to support the agency's "Phase One" Moon Base objectives.
NASA is also following through on a promise Isaacman made in June, when he proposed repurposing an engineering model of the Perseverance and Curiosity Mars rovers (essentially an Earth-based twin) as a mission-ready rover to send to the moon. That rover, called PROMISE (short for "Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration"), is a nuclear-powered robot 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 period based on performance, to deliver PROMISE to the lunar surface aboard its Blue Moon Mark 1 lander.