NASA has unveiled a package of Moon Base awards including the nuclear-powered PROMISE rover for the lunar south pole, an eight-company cargo delivery framework worth up to $10 billion, and about $1.3 billion in launch and transport orders.
NASA has unveiled a sweeping package of Moon Base awards, including a nuclear-powered rover for the lunar south pole, an eight-company framework for cargo deliveries worth up to $10 billion, and about $1.3 billion in launch and transport orders, the agency announced on Saturday.
The centrepiece is PROMISE — the Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration — a six-wheeled rover that will run on nuclear power so it can keep working through the long lunar nights and inside permanently shadowed craters thought to hold water ice. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will build it from spare flight parts and engineering test models left over from the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers. It will carry a drill to pull up lunar dust from about a metre down, along with spectrometers, temperature and radiation sensors and cameras.
Blue Origin won a $94 million base contract, with a $140 million option tied to performance, to deliver PROMISE to the south pole on its Mark 1 lander, with a launch targeted for late 2028 and an 18-month mission. Under the new CLPS 2 framework, eight companies — Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, iSpace US, Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies — will compete for future lunar delivery missions. NASA also raised the ceiling on the existing CLPS contract from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion.
The announcement comes from NASA itself, and the figures are the agency's. Two cautions apply. The $10 billion is a ceiling for a framework under which companies compete for task orders, not money already awarded, and the late-2028 launch date for PROMISE is a target, not a commitment. The rover is at the development stage — NASA said it is "moving forward" with the vehicle, which has yet to be built or tested.
The south pole is where the Moon Base plan stands or falls. Water ice in the shadowed craters could become drinking water, breathable oxygen and rocket fuel, and PROMISE's job is to find out how much is really there and where exactly it sits. The rover's drill and spectrometers will map the ground future astronauts and landers will depend on, and its findings will shape where the base itself goes.
"We are building the Moon Base mission by mission," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in the announcement. The next steps are the first CLPS 2 task orders and the launch manifest for the transport missions — including a cargo flight for CAPSTONE 02 and the MoonFall scouting drones — that will carry the programme toward the rover's launch window.