NASA announced a big set of Moon Base awards on Saturday at the MAX POWER expo at Kennedy Space Center.
Highlights
- CLPS 2: a 10-year contract with up to $10 billion in total, with eight companies eligible to compete for lunar deliveries: Blue Origin, Firefly, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SpaceX and Voyager. CLPS 1.0 also grows from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion.
- PROMISE: a six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover that JPL is building from Curiosity and Perseverance spares. It can work through lunar nights and in permanently shadowed craters, and it has a drill that reaches about a meter down to look for ice. It’s targeting a late-2028 launch, and Blue Origin got a $94 million base contract to deliver it.
- Transport: six VADR task orders to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space for cargo and orbital transfer demos.
Administrator Jared Isaacman: “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.”
My take
Building it mission by mission, with lots of providers, is the right way to do it. A nuclear rover hunting for ice at the South Pole is very cool.
God Bless, and Use the Source!
