NASA has committed nearly $600 million to three commercial space companies for four robotic Moon landings scheduled for late 2028, marking one of the agency’s largest single-day investments in the infrastructure it will need to keep astronauts alive on the lunar surface for months at a time.
The awards went to Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS. Astrobotic received $297.9 million for two deliveries. Firefly and Intuitive Machines each picked up a single mission, worth $144.2 million and $148.3 million respectively, according to a NASA announcement.
All four landers will carry the same three science instruments. That repetition is the point.
Building a proving ground, one lander at a time
The four flights are part of a broader push to stand up what NASA is calling its Moon Base Program — a permanent foothold on the lunar surface supported by robotic cargo runs, communication satellites, and rovers. The agency now has 17 surface deliveries booked across multiple commercial providers, as reported by ScienceDaily.
"These new awards to our commercial partners, totaling nearly $600 million to land more missions on the Moon with science payloads, demonstrate our commitment to accelerating our effort to build a long-term presence on the lunar surface," said a NASA official.
NASA’s acting director of cargo landers described the strategy as building "a proving ground for Moon Base operations," saying the faster ordering cadence lets the agency "move quickly to learn, iterate, and improve."
The pace matters. CLPS started as a bet that private landers, built cheaper and faster than traditional NASA hardware, could carry science payloads to the Moon on something like a commercial shipping schedule. Early results were mixed — landers tipped over, missed targets, and lost power sooner than planned. The 2028 flights are meant to prove that failure mode has passed.
Three instruments, four landing sites
Every one of the four missions will fly an identical trio of instruments. The design choice turns the fleet into something resembling a distributed field experiment across the lunar surface.
The first is SCALPSS — Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies. Four small cameras will image the ground beneath each lander as its engines fire during descent, building 3D reconstructions of how the exhaust plume tears into lunar regolith. Dust kicked up by landings is not a cosmetic problem. It sandblasts nearby hardware, coats solar panels, and can hide hazards from the next spacecraft trying to touch down close by.
The second instrument is a Laser Retroreflector Array, a dome roughly the size of a cookie packed with eight quartz corner-cube prisms. Once bolted to the lunar surface, it becomes a permanent survey marker that any future orbiter or lander with a laser rangefinder can use to fix its position with high precision. Four new landings mean four new fixed points in a growing lunar navigation grid.
The third is LETS, a radiation monitor that will log the dose future astronauts would absorb standing in the same spot. The Moon has no meaningful atmosphere and no global magnetic field, so galactic cosmic rays and solar particle events hit the surface almost unfiltered.
A NASA deputy associate administrator for exploration compared the setup to a global weather network. Flying the same payloads to different sites will help the agency "better understand potential hazards during landing and build out a global network of environmental data and location markers on the Moon."
Why identical payloads matter
Scientific instruments flown to the Moon have historically been one-offs. Every lander carried a different suite, calibrated differently, aimed at a different question. Comparing results across missions was a headache.
The CLPS approach flips that. If the same dust camera watches four different landers touch down on four different terrains, engineers can finally separate what the lander is doing from what the ground is doing. If the same radiation detector runs at four different latitudes, planners can map dose gradients rather than guess between them.
That kind of comparative dataset is what a permanent base needs. Astronauts staying weeks or months at a time will want to know which sites bake them with more radiation, which regolith blows up worst under a descent engine, and where the retroreflector network is dense enough to guide a precision landing next to an existing habitat.
The three companies carrying the load
Each of the three winning contractors has already flown to the Moon, with varying results. Intuitive Machines put the first US lander on the surface since Apollo in 2024, though it tipped on touchdown. Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander made a clean upright landing in early 2025. Astrobotic’s first attempt never reached the Moon after a propellant leak, but the company has a second vehicle in development.
NASA is now betting on all three to deliver on tight timelines, as Interesting Engineering reported. Astrobotic’s double award, the largest of the three, signals particular confidence in the company’s ability to scale up to back-to-back deliveries.
The contracts also come as NASA moves to raise the overall CLPS ceiling to accommodate more flights, according to SpaceNews. The program was originally capped at a fraction of what the current manifest will cost.
What comes next: rovers, relays, and a permanent presence
The four landers are only one thread. NASA is also developing a polar rover aimed squarely at the permanently shadowed craters near the lunar south pole, where water ice trapped in the cold could one day supply drinking water, breathable oxygen, and rocket propellant.
Also on the drawing board is a lunar communication and navigation relay constellation — essentially a set of Moon-orbiting satellites that would give surface hardware constant radio contact with Earth and GPS-like positioning. Without it, landers on the far side or deep in polar craters go dark for long stretches.
The plan connects to the broader Artemis effort to put humans back on the Moon and keep them there. NASA’s first crewed lunar landing in the current program has slipped multiple times, but the robotic cargo pipeline is moving faster than the human one.
A different Moon program than Apollo
Apollo was a sprint — six landings in three and a half years, then nothing for half a century. The current architecture looks very different. Small robotic landers arrive first and often. Instruments are standardized. Data accumulates. Rovers scout. Relay satellites go up. Astronauts follow later, into a place that has already been surveyed, mapped, and instrumented.
That approach mirrors how humans have historically settled hard places on Earth: send scouts, build supply lines, then send the people. The Artemis II crew, whose upcoming flight around the Moon is meant to test crewed systems before a landing, will fly over terrain that CLPS landers are already scoping out from the surface.
Whether the 2028 landings actually happen on time is another question. Every prior CLPS mission has slipped from its original date. The instruments are proven, but the landers carrying them are still relatively new hardware from young companies. Four flights in a single year would be a step change from anything the program has delivered so far.
What the awards do settle is intent. NASA is no longer treating a permanent lunar outpost as a distant aspiration to be studied. It is buying the cargo flights.