NASA awards Moon Base contracts, including a nuclear-powered polar rover

NASA announced a large batch of contracts for its Moon Base program on November 7, 2026, at an aerospace expo at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The awards cover cargo landers, launches, power systems, and a new robotic rover for the Moon's south pole. Administrator Jared Isaacman summed up the approach: "We are building the Moon Base mission by mission."

More robotic landers

The biggest piece is CLPS 2, the next phase of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which buys rides to the Moon from private companies. Eight companies will compete for deliveries: Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman, SpaceX, and Voyager Technologies. The 10-year contract has a combined ceiling of $10 billion. NASA also raised the value of the current CLPS contract from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion.

A Mars rover's sibling for the Moon

The announcement that will interest many readers is PROMISE, short for Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration. It is a six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will build largely from spare flight parts and test hardware left over from the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers. Nuclear power lets it keep working through the two-week lunar night and inside permanently shadowed craters, where water ice is thought to be hiding.

PROMISE will carry a drill that reaches about 3 feet (1 meter) down, plus spectrometers, cameras, and temperature and radiation sensors. Launch is targeted for late 2028 for an 18-month mission. Blue Origin won a $94 million base contract, with options worth up to $140 million more, to deliver it on a Blue Moon Mark 1 lander.

Launches, power and communications

NASA also issued six task orders worth about $1.3 billion to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin, and Impulse Space to carry Moon Base cargo. Those flights include communications and navigation tests, drone surveys of the south pole before astronauts arrive, and the CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft. A separate project called miniCAST will test solar power, batteries, and wireless power transfer on the surface, with hardware from Honeybee Robotics, Redwire, and Yank Technologies.

The south pole is too close to the lunar limb to see in detail from Earth, but the Moon's southern highlands are a rewarding binocular and telescope target near first and last quarter. Our telescope buying guide can help you get started.

What comes next: NASA says work on miniCAST components should start within months, with a call for fully integrated power systems expected in early 2027.