NASA has selected three aerospace companies for four robotic lunar lander missions worth nearly $590 million, the agency announced June 30, advancing the backbone of its Moon Base program. Astrobotic Technology will receive $297.9 million for two upgraded Peregrine landers, Firefly Aerospace will receive $144.2 million for one upgraded Blue Ghost mission, and Intuitive Machines will receive $148.3 million for one upgraded Nova-C lander. All four missions are targeting landings in late 2028.
The awards are part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative and feed directly into NASA’s broader Moon Base roadmap, a $30 billion program unveiled by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman in March 2026. Under a December 2025 executive order from the Trump administration, NASA is directed to land people on the Moon by 2028 and build a permanent crewed outpost by 2030. The program envisions 79 total launches, 73 lunar landers, and 10 moon buggies.
Each of the four landers will carry a common set of science payloads: the SCALPSS stereo camera to study plume-surface interactions during landing, the LETS radiation spectrometer to measure the energetic particle environment en route and on the surface, and a laser retroreflector array for lunar laser ranging. NASA compares these instruments to “weather stations in different locations on Earth,” building a global network of environmental monitoring stations across the Moon.
Astrobotic’s two upgraded Peregrine landers will target the Gruithuisen Domes region on the lunar near side. The company, currently being acquired by Voyager Technologies, is drawing on lessons learned from earlier programs. Firefly’s upgraded Blue Ghost marks the company’s fifth CLPS award following the fully successful first Blue Ghost mission. CEO Jason Kim described the work as “shifting the paradigm from custom aerospace engineering to commercial mass production of lunar infrastructure.” Intuitive Machines, which has conducted two partially successful lunar landings, receives its sixth CLPS award. CEO Steve Altemus emphasized the goal of “persistent, reliable and commercial baselines of transport, connectivity, and operations” on the lunar surface.
The missions are designated as Moon Base 3 and 4 in NASA’s sequence, following Moon Base 1 (Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander) and Moon Base 2 (Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 mission planned for late 2026). A potential PROMISE rover, originally built for Mars, may be diverted to become NASA’s first-ever lunar rover.
The awards come against a backdrop of risk: Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket suffered a catastrophic pad explosion during a static-fire test in May or June 2026, destroying a rocket and severely damaging Launch Complex 36. NASA is sticking with New Glenn as the primary launch vehicle for its Moon Base architecture but has until mid-2027 before it would need to consider alternatives.