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NASA purchased two more missions aboard Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1 landers to fly rovers to the lunar surface.
CAPE CANAVERAL—NASA has awarded contracts totaling nearly $1 billion for a pair of crew-capable lunar rovers and transportation services to land them on the Moon, hopefully ahead of the planned Artemis IV mission in early 2028, the agency announced May 26.
The Lunar Terrain Vehicles (LTV) will be built by startups AstroLab and Lunar Outpost and flown separately to the Moon aboard Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 1 landing systems. The LTV contracts are worth about $220 million each. NASA said it will pay Blue Origin up to $468 million for two Blue Moon Mark 1 missions to deliver the LTVs to the lunar surface.
“Certainly, we want to have an LTV ... before the Artemis IV mission,” Carlos García-Galán, NASA Moon Base program executive, told reporters. “We’ll try to line it up so that crew has an LTV to go explore around.”
Having a rover available is not a requirement for the Artemis IV mission, added newly named Associate Administrator Lori Glaze, head of the Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate (HSMD), which now oversees both the Artemis and future deep-space exploration programs, as well as the International Space Station (ISS) and other crewed spaceflight programs in low Earth orbit.
“In the LTV task order solicitation we did require each of the vendors to provide a crewed and uncrewed versions so we know what they are capable of,” Glaze told Aviation Week in a follow-on telephone interview. We did ultimately select the two crewed versions from two providers. They’re pretty credible bids, and so we said ‘Why not? Let’s push them forward on the crewed versions and we’ll see how we do.”
“I really love the approach of trying to do lots of smaller things and yes, some of those are higher risk, but we’re going to get many, many shots and we’ll learn a lot as we go,” she added. “I prefer this over trying to wait for the one exquisite thing down the road that we never seem to get to.”
Blue Origin’s Mark 1, which flies on the company’s New Glenn rocket, is slated to debut this year as part of a previously awarded NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract to deliver the agency’s Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies science payload to the Moon.
Blue Origin also is developing the crewed Blue Moon Mark 2 lunar lander to ferry astronauts to and from lunar orbit and the Moon’s surface. Blue Origin’s Human Landing System (HLS) is expected to fly after a variant of SpaceX’s still-in-development Starship HLS, although NASA is looking to fly demonstration missions with both vehicles as part of the Artemis III mission targeted for mid-2027.
NASA declined to say if SpaceX or other companies bid to fly the LTVs.
Separately, NASA awarded Firefly Aerospace a $75 million contract to fly up to four drones to the Moon, with launch targeted for 2028. The drones, in development by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, are intended to independently land on the lunar surface and spend one lunar day gathering high-resolution imagery of remote terrain. The drones, collectively known as Moonfall, are designed to fly short hops on the lunar surface to survey potential landing sites for future Artemis crews.
NASA intends to use the drones, which will operate about 1 mi. apart from each other, to stake out a region for its proposed base near the lunar south pole. “We’re going to be able to basically put them at the corners of the areas where we think we have either key scientific objectives, or we want to build up the Moon base,” García-Galán said.
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