NASA updates Moon Base CLPS program as Canada weighs Canadarm3’s future

NASA announced Saturday it has picked eight companies to compete for a decade of cargo deliveries to the Moon, and ordered a nuclear-powered rover to explore the lunar South Pole from late 2028.

Administrator Jared Isaacman unveiled the awards at the MAX POWER aerospace expo at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Alongside the landers and the rover, the package covers launches, a lunar communications demonstration and surface power hardware, all for NASA‘s Moon Base program.

The new CLPS 2 contract

The new contract succeeds the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program under which NASA has been paying private companies to land its instruments on the Moon. The eight winners are Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies.

CLPS 2 is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract — a pool of providers NASA orders from mission by mission. It will run for a decade with a combined ceiling of $US 10 billion, so at most about $US 1 billion a year shared among the eight. Each delivery is competed, so in theory one or more companies could end up without any missions.

NASA also raised the value of the first CLPS contract pool to $US 4.2 billion from $US 2.6 billion to cover the first phase of Moon Base. It will stay open for new orders until November 2028, and the companies have until November 2033 to fly them.

NASA’s new, old, PROMISE rover

The rover, the Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration (PROMISE), is an SUV-sized, six-wheeled vehicle that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will assemble from spare flight parts and engineering test models left over from the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers.

It will run on a spare multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator, a nuclear battery that turns the heat of decaying plutonium into electricity. Solar-powered landers freeze in the two-week lunar night; PROMISE should not, and it can drive into craters that never see sunlight, where water ice is thought to be trapped.

“Having a nuclear battery on it allows us to go anywhere we want, regardless of the illumination,” Carlos Garcia-Galan, NASA’s Moon Base program manager, said in June, when the rover was still a proposal.

Its payload includes a drill that reaches about a metre into the soil, built by Blue Origin subsidiary Honeybee Robotics, plus a mass spectrometer, neutron and infrared spectrometers, a radiation detector and a laser reflector for navigation. Four of the instruments are shared with NASA’s VIPER rover. NASA is targeting a late 2028 launch and an 18-month mission.

Blue Origin will carry PROMISE on its Mark 1 lander under a $US 94 million base contract, with a $US 140 million option tied to performance. The award expands the task order Blue Origin won in May to deliver NASA’s two lunar terrain vehicles.

Launches and power

NASA also issued six task orders worth about $US 1.3 billion combined to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space. They fall under the Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract, NASA’s procurement vehicle for launches on smaller and newer rockets, which has a $US 5 billion ceiling.

The orders cover test flights such as the CAPSTONE 02 deep-space mission, South Pole survey work including JPL’s MoonFall drones, built to scout terrain beyond a rover’s reach, and demonstrations of navigation and orbital transfer between Earth and the Moon. The rides will come on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Relativity Space’s Terran R and SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

SpaceX, under an existing lunar logistics contract, will launch communications satellites on a Starship to cislunar space in 2028. For miniCAST, a small solar tower to power and link equipment on the surface, NASA picked Honeybee Robotics for energy storage, Redwire for power generation and Yank Technologies for wireless power transfer. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center will assemble and test it.

Canada’s place?

In May, NASA gave Lunar Outpost one of two terrain vehicle contracts for its Pegasus rover, built by a team that includes MDA Space, and said the vehicles would ride to the surface on Blue Origin’s Mark 1, the lander now also booked for PROMISE. MDA is supplying infrastructure expertise to that team.

Canadian hardware has already landed on two of the eight CLPS 2 companies’ machines: Canadensys Aerospace technology aboard Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus in February 2024, and coatings from Markham’s Integrity Testing Laboratory on a NASA dust experiment aboard Firefly’s Blue Ghost in March 2025. Each CLPS 2 flight over the next decade is another chance for Canadian instruments to ride along.

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) cancelled its own small Lunar Rover Mission in March as part of federal spending cuts. The Canadensys-built rover was to fly on a Firefly lander in 2029.

Ottawa has instead set aside $1.2 billion over 13 years for the Lunar Utility Vehicle, a larger rover to haul cargo and support astronauts, due no earlier than 2033. Canadensys, MDA Space and Mission Control are doing concept studies ahead of the choice of a prime contractor.

Also to consider is the Lunar Gateway / Canadarm3 program and where it fits into the updated NASA plans. Gateway is “paused,” as NASA put it, which at the moment means it’s not going forward, but the Canadian government has committed to supporting the Canadarm3 program, repurposing it for the lunar surface. The government has not yet said how the program will proceed under NASA’s new plans. According to SpaceQ’s tracking of federal Moon program contracts, checked against Government of Canada open data, the government has committed to date $1.68 billion to the Lunar Gateway / Canadarm3 program, 91 per cent of the $1.85 billion committed to its Moon program since it was announced in 2019.

What comes next for NASA

NASA plans a solicitation for fully integrated surface power systems in early 2027. A separate call will seek the data it still needs about Moon Base sites, whether from small spacecraft, instruments on future flights or data bought from companies.

“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,” Isaacman said. How much of that base carries Canadian parts will be settled one delivery at a time.