NASA Picks Eight Lunar Delivery Companies and Sends a Nuclear-Powered Rover to the Moon's South Pole

NASA announced a set of Moon Base awards on Saturday, November 7, 2026, at the MAX POWER expo and air show at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to build a lasting presence at the Moon's South Pole, the agency said.

The release does not give a clock time for the announcement, so none is given here.

What NASA said

The agency's release lists four areas: commercial robotic deliveries, a nuclear-powered rover named PROMISE, launch and orbital transfer services, and surface infrastructure. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman put it this way: "We are building the Moon Base mission by mission."

Carlos García-Galán, manager of the Moon Base Program, said the agency has consolidated numerous efforts into a streamlined program in the eight months since Ignition. The release does not say what Ignition refers to, so this story leaves it there.

Eight companies for the next round of deliveries

NASA selected eight companies for the next phase of CLPS, which stands for Commercial Lunar Payload Services. They are Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies. Under a new contract called CLPS 2, they can compete for future missions to carry NASA science, technology and infrastructure payloads to the lunar surface.

NASA describes CLPS 2 as a 10-year contract with multiple winners and a combined maximum value of $10 billion. The agency also raised the value of the current CLPS 1.0 contract from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion to support the first phase of Moon Base goals. NASA says the original contract stays in place through November 2028, with five more years, through November 2033, to finish deliveries already awarded.

PROMISE, the rover

PROMISE stands for Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration. NASA says the six-wheeled rover will land near the South Pole to study the surface and what lies beneath it, assess resources, and help pick landing sites for later work. It is nuclear-powered, which NASA says lets it work through long lunar nights and inside permanently shadowed regions thought to hold ice.

Here is the detail I liked. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will build the rover partly from spare flight parts and engineering test models left over from NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers. NASA says using proven hardware cuts cost and shortens the testing timeline. The agency says it has assessed that hardware and determined it can handle the harsh conditions near the Moon's South Pole.

The rover will carry a drill to pull up regolith (lunar dust) from about 3 feet (1 meter) down, according to NASA. It will also carry spectrometers to read the chemistry of surface material, temperature and radiation sensors, and visible-light cameras. It will test a radiation-tolerant computer system, NASA's High Performance Spaceflight Computing, along with new autonomy sensors and software.

NASA is targeting late 2028 for launch and planning an 18-month mission. Both are targets and plans, not scheduled dates.

Blue Origin gets the ride. NASA awarded it a $94 million base contract, with an option worth another $140 million based on performance, to deliver PROMISE to the South Pole using its Mark 1 lander. This expands a task order awarded in May 2026 to deliver two lunar terrain vehicles.

Launch and transfer awards

NASA also awarded six task orders under its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare contract, known as VADR. The winners are Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space. NASA says the orders are worth approximately $1.3 billion combined, under a 10-year contract with a maximum total value of $5 billion across all contracts. NASA's Launch Services Program Office at Kennedy manages it.

The agency compares orbital transfer vehicles to long-distance freight trucks that carry big loads across space, while landers make the final drop to the surface. The orders cover three kinds of mission:

- Risk reduction for long-term human flight. These missions will check communication and navigation on the trip from Earth orbit to the Moon, and test whether a transfer vehicle can place a CLPS lander in the right orbit. They will deliver the CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft to test close maneuvers, navigation and communications around the Moon.
- Preparing the South Pole. These missions will send a group of highly mobile drones, NASA's MoonFall drones, to scout ground that regular rovers cannot reach, plus more Moon Base equipment for Phase One.
- Cislunar testing. These will test navigation and operations in several orbits between Earth and the Moon, and show commercial transfer capabilities meant to let future landers carry more cargo.

NASA says some missions will fly on Blue Origin's New Glenn, Relativity Space's Terran R and SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets. Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Impulse Space and Quantum Space will provide the in-space transportation spacecraft.

The release also says NASA selected SpaceX for the Cislunar Communications Deployment Demo. The text available to me cuts off there, so I cannot say what that award involves or what it is worth.

What is next

Per NASA, PROMISE is targeted for launch in late 2028. The original CLPS contract runs through November 2028. Dates for the individual delivery and transfer missions are not in the release, and neither are the first CLPS 2 task orders. NASA's own account says only that the eight companies are now eligible to compete.

Stay curious.

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