NASA gives more lunar lander contracts to three US companies

WASHINGTON – NASA selected three more companies to send robotic landers to the moon as part of efforts to establish a lunar base before the end of the decade.

The agency announced on June 30 two awards to Astrobotic Technology Inc totalling about US$298 million (S$385.61 million), one for about US$144 million to Firefly Aerospace Inc and another for about US$148 million to Intuitive Machines Inc.

NASA is also considering plans to send to the moon the Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration (Promise), a test version of the agency’s Mars rovers.

“We’ve got the hardware and this is exactly what we should be trying to do, to put wins on the board, getting a capability like Promise to the surface of the moon,” said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman at a media briefing.

Astrobotic will send a lander to the moon in 2026 or early 2027 that will be an updated version of the company’s Peregrine lander that had an unsuccessful mission in 2024.

“They’re applying a lot of the lessons learned from the previous Peregrine build out, and we expect to see a spacecraft that has those additional capabilities,” said Carlos García-Galán, NASA’s moon base programme manager.

In early June, Voyager Technologies Inc signed an agreement to acquire Astrobotic for as much as roughly US$300 million.

Intuitive Machines became the first company to land a commercial spacecraft intact on the moon’s surface in 2024, but its lander tipped over during its descent, limiting its overall mission on the surface.

A second attempt by the company in March 2025 also had a flawed landing.

That same month, Firefly successfully landed its first robotic spacecraft on the moon.

In March, Isaacman laid out the agency’s plans to invest more than US$20 billion over the next seven years to build a base on the moon where astronauts could live and work.

The framework entailed launching a fleet of landers, rovers, drones, power generators and other critical hardware.

The plan is also wrapped into NASA’s Artemis programme, which aims to send humans back to the moon.

With its Artemis II mission in April, the agency sent a crew of four astronauts around the moon to test hardware that will be used to land people on the lunar surface as early as 2028. BLOOMBERG