What is NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Initiative?

Introduction

NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative represents one of the most significant shifts in the agency’s approach to planetary exploration in decades. At its heart, CLPS is a program designed to transport scientific instruments and technology demonstrations to the surface of the Moon. Yet, its method is as important as its mission. Rather than designing, building, and operating its own lunar landers, NASA is buying a ride from a growing pool of American companies. This initiative serves as a foundational element of the broader Artemis campaign, which is set to return astronauts to the lunar surface and establish a long-term, sustainable human presence.

This commercial pivot is a deliberate departure from the traditional, government-led model of space exploration that defined the Apollo era. The CLPS program functions on the principle of purchasing end-to-end delivery services, effectively making NASA a customer for lunar transport. With a cumulative contract value of $2.6 billion through 2028, the initiative is structured to enable rapid, frequent, and more affordable access to the Moon, with a planned cadence of about two deliveries per year. By fostering a competitive marketplace for lunar logistics, NASA is not only accelerating its scientific objectives but is also actively cultivating a commercial space economy that extends far beyond low-Earth orbit.

A New Model for Lunar Exploration

The operational mechanics of the CLPS program are what set it apart from historical NASA endeavors. The agency does not own the spacecraft; instead, it procures a service. Through a series of competitive task orders, NASA contracts with commercial providers for a complete, door-to-door delivery. This service encompasses every phase of a mission, from integrating NASA’s scientific payloads into the lander on Earth, to securing a launch vehicle, navigating to the Moon, executing a soft landing, and, in some cases, operating the instruments on the lunar surface. The commercial company retains ownership of its lander design and is fully responsible for the success of the mission.

The Service-Based Approach and Risk Philosophy

Central to this model is the use of firm-fixed-price (FFP) contracts. Under this structure, NASA and the company agree on a set price for the delivery service. If the company encounters technical problems or cost overruns during development or flight, the financial burden falls on the company, not the American taxpayer. This approach deliberately transfers a significant amount of technical and financial risk from the government to the private sector.

This risk philosophy is a calculated one. NASA’s own Office of Inspector General has noted that the conditions of the CLPS program—working with new companies, many with limited spaceflight experience, on the technically demanding task of landing on the Moon—are not traditionally suited for FFP contracts, which work best when requirements are stable and risks are low. This highlights the intentional nature of the strategy. NASA is accepting a higher probability of individual mission failures in exchange for the benefits of a competitive, commercial environment: innovation, speed, and lower costs over the long term. The program effectively functions as a high-stakes incubator for a new industry. Early mission challenges, including outright failures, are seen not just as setbacks but as part of an accelerated learning curve for the entire commercial sector. This stands in stark contrast to the meticulous, risk-averse, and vastly more expensive approach required for flagship NASA missions, especially those involving human crews.

Building a Lunar Economy

The strategic objective extends beyond simply getting NASA’s science to the Moon. The agency’s stated goal is to act as an “anchor tenant” or a “first adopter” for commercial lunar services. By providing a steady stream of contracts, NASA is creating the foundational demand needed to kickstart a self-sustaining lunar marketplace. To further this goal, NASA actively encourages its commercial partners to fly payloads for other customers—such as private companies, universities, and international space agencies—on the same missions. A key measure of the program’s long-term success will be the emergence of a lunar delivery market that can thrive without NASA instruments on every flight.

This creates a delicate interdependency. While NASA envisions a future where it is just one of many customers, the current reality is that the commercial lunar market is almost entirely dependent on the agency’s business. The NASA OIG found that a consistent cadence of task orders is essential to keep the commercial vendors financially viable and invested in developing their capabilities. The fragility of this nascent ecosystem was demonstrated when Masten Space Systems, one of the selected CLPS providers, filed for bankruptcy, leading to the cancellation of its planned mission. This underscores how reliant the emerging market remains on NASA’s programmatic stability and sustained funding. The success of the CLPS initiative, therefore, rests on a careful balance between fostering commercial independence and providing the necessary government support to ensure the industry survives its formative years.

The Commercial Partners

To build this new lunar marketplace, NASA established a diverse pool of American companies eligible to bid on CLPS delivery contracts. The selection process began in 2018 with an initial group of nine companies, a list that was later expanded to fourteen in 2019 to accommodate growing interest and capabilities within the U.S. aerospace sector. This vendor pool intentionally includes a mix of established aerospace giants and smaller, more agile startups, fostering a broad industrial base for lunar exploration.

The table below lists the companies that form the CLPS provider pool, representing the key players in this emerging commercial endeavor. This group competes for task orders to deliver NASA’s payloads, driving innovation and creating a competitive ecosystem for accessing the Moon.

Early Missions: Trials and Triumphs

The initial flights of the CLPS program put its high-risk, high-reward philosophy to the test, providing a dramatic and rapid learning curve for the entire industry. The sequence of failures, partial successes, and ultimate triumph vividly illustrates the iterative nature of commercial spaceflight, where each mission, regardless of its outcome, provides invaluable data for the next.

Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One (Failure)

The CLPS initiative began its flight operations with Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One, which launched on January 8, 2024, on the highly anticipated debut of United Launch Alliance‘s Vulcan Centaur rocket. The mission carried five NASA science payloads and a host of commercial cargo, with the goal of landing in a lunar lava plain known as Sinus Viscositatis.

The mission’s hopes were dashed just hours after a successful launch. Shortly after separating from the rocket, the Peregrine lander experienced a critical propulsion system anomaly. A post-mission investigation concluded that a valve responsible for controlling the flow of high-pressure helium failed to properly reseal after its initial activation. This allowed helium to surge into the oxidizer tank, raising the pressure far beyond its design limits and causing the tank to rupture. The resulting propellant leak made a lunar landing impossible.

Despite the mission-ending failure, the Astrobotic flight control team demonstrated remarkable ingenuity. They managed to stabilize the tumbling spacecraft, orient its solar panels toward the Sun to generate power, and operate the lander for over ten days in deep space. During this time, several of the onboard payloads, including NASA’s radiation spectrometers, were powered on and collected valuable scientific data on the cislunar environment. The mission concluded on January 18, 2024, with a carefully managed and controlled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere over a remote area of the South Pacific, a responsible decision made in consultation with NASA to prevent the creation of hazardous space debris.

Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 (Partial Success)

The second CLPS mission, Intuitive Machines’ IM-1, launched on February 15, 2024, with its Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, carrying six NASA payloads toward the Malapert A crater near the Moon’s south pole. On February 22, 2024, the mission made history. Odysseus executed a soft landing, becoming the first commercial spacecraft ever to do so and marking the first American landing on the Moon in more than 50 years.

The historic achievement was not without drama. During the final approach, flight controllers discovered that the lander’s primary laser rangefinders, essential for navigation, were not functioning. In a remarkable display of real-time problem-solving, the team switched to using an experimental NASA payload—the Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL)—to provide the critical altitude and velocity data needed for landing. While this allowed the landing to proceed, the spacecraft came down faster than planned and tipped over upon contact with the uneven lunar surface.

The sideways orientation severely limited the lander’s ability to generate power from its solar panels and communicate with Earth. Nonetheless, flight controllers managed to operate Odysseus for approximately seven Earth days. In that time, all of the NASA science payloads were activated and returned at least some data. The mission was ultimately declared a partial success, proving that a private company could overcome significant in-flight challenges to reach the lunar surface.

Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 (Failure)

Building on the lessons from IM-1, Intuitive Machines launched its second mission, IM-2, in February 2025. The Athena lander was tasked with a more ambitious scientific objective: delivering the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) to Mons Mouton, a plateau near the south pole. PRIME-1 consisted of a meter-long drill called TRIDENT and a mass spectrometer named MSOLO, designed to be the first instruments to drill for and analyze potential water ice below the lunar surface.

The mission once again demonstrated the immense difficulty of landing on the Moon. On March 6, 2025, Athena successfully reached the surface, but like its predecessor, it landed on its side. The orientation made it impossible to deploy the PRIME-1 drill, and the lander’s solar panels were again compromised, this time by a coating of regolith kicked up during the landing. The mission ended prematurely before its primary scientific goals could be achieved, marking it as a failure despite the successful touchdown. The back-to-back landing problems highlighted persistent challenges with terminal descent and stability for the Nova-C lander design, even after the company reported making 65 improvements following the IM-1 mission.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 (Success)

The narrative of the CLPS program took a decisive turn with Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1. Launched in January 2025, the mission carried a suite of 10 NASA payloads to Mare Crisium, a vast basaltic plain on the Moon’s near side. On March 2, 2025, the Blue Ghost lander executed a flawless, upright soft landing, achieving the first fully successful mission in CLPS history.

The success was comprehensive. The lander and its payloads operated for the entire 14-Earth-day duration of the lunar day and even continued to transmit data for several hours into the freezing lunar night. Firefly transmitted over 119 GB of data back to Earth, and all 10 NASA instruments successfully completed their mission objectives. These achievements included several firsts: demonstrating the use of Earth’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals for positioning on the lunar surface, robotically drilling into the lunar regolith to measure heat flow, and testing an electrodynamic dust shield to clean surfaces. The mission provided a powerful validation of the CLPS model, proving that a commercial partner could deliver a complex suite of instruments and conduct sustained science operations on the Moon.

The table below provides a concise summary of these pioneering missions, charting the program’s progress from initial failure to landmark success.

The Road Ahead: Upcoming Lunar Deliveries

With the initial phase of flight testing complete, the CLPS program is moving toward missions of increasing scientific ambition and technological complexity. The upcoming manifest showcases a clear evolution from simply proving landing capabilities to conducting targeted science in some of the Moon’s most challenging and unexplored regions, often with significant international collaboration.

Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission 1

Astrobotic’s second CLPS flight represents a major case study in the program’s flexibility. The mission was originally awarded a contract to deliver NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), a golf-cart-sized vehicle designed to be the agency’s first robotic Moon rover. VIPER’s primary goal was to prospect for water ice in the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar south pole, a critical step for future human exploration.

However, in July 2024, NASA made the difficult decision to cancel the VIPER rover project. The cancellation was driven by significant cost growth and schedule delays, concerns that were amplified after the failure of Astrobotic’s first mission raised questions about the readiness of its larger Griffin lander. This decision, made after approximately $450 million had already been spent on the rover, demonstrated a strict adherence to budget discipline rarely seen in large government space projects.

In a move that underscored its commitment to the commercial service model, NASA opted to continue its contract with Astrobotic for the Griffin lander’s flight, even without a primary NASA payload. The flight will now serve as a crucial technology demonstration for the heavy-lift lander. The programmatic agility of the CLPS model was further highlighted by the rapid response from the commercial market. Astrobotic quickly secured a new primary payload: the FLIP rover, built by the California company Astrolab. Scheduled to launch in late 2025 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the mission will now deliver the FLIP rover to the lunar south pole to conduct its own investigations, including studying the risks posed by lunar dust.

Intuitive Machines’ Future Flights

Intuitive Machines has two ambitious missions on its manifest that aim to answer fundamental questions about the Moon.

• IM-3 (CP-11): Scheduled for a 2026 launch, this mission will target Reiner Gamma, a strange, tadpole-shaped surface feature known as a “lunar swirl”. Swirls are associated with areas of localized magnetic fields, and their origin is a long-standing lunar mystery. The lander will carry the Lunar Vertex payload suite, which includes magnetometers and a rover, to investigate the swirl’s properties up close. The mission will also demonstrate cooperative autonomous exploration by deploying a team of four small CADRE rovers and will carry payloads for the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI).
• IM-4 (CP-22): In 2027, the company plans to return to the lunar south pole. This delivery will carry six NASA instruments, most notably ESA‘s PROSPECT payload, which features a drill designed to extract and analyze subsurface samples for water and other volatiles. The mission will also carry a space biology experiment, transporting yeast to the lunar surface to study how life reacts to the combined effects of deep-space radiation and lunar gravity.

Firefly Aerospace’s Next Blue Ghost Missions

Following its initial success, Firefly is undertaking two highly complex missions that push the boundaries of lunar exploration.

• Blue Ghost Mission 2 (CS-3): This 2026 mission is a multi-part delivery to the far side of the Moon. It will use a novel two-stage spacecraft. An orbital transfer vehicle, called Elytra, will first deploy ESA‘s Lunar Pathfinder communications relay satellite into orbit around the Moon. This is a critical piece of infrastructure, as the far side never faces Earth, making direct communication impossible. The Blue Ghost lander will then separate and descend to the surface. Its primary payload is NASA’s LuSEE-Night (Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment at Night), a radio telescope that will take advantage of the uniquely radio-quiet environment of the far side to listen for faint signals from the universe’s “Dark Ages”—the period before the first stars formed. The mission is a major international effort, also carrying a seismometer from Australia (SPIDER) and the Rashid 2 rover from the United Arab Emirates.
• Blue Ghost Mission 3 (CP-21): Targeting a 2028 landing, this mission will send a rover to explore the Gruithuisen Domes. These are mysterious volcanic formations thought to be rich in silica, a composition that is very different from the basaltic rocks returned by the Apollo missions and suggests a unique style of volcanism. The mission’s Lunar-VISE (Lunar Vulkan Imaging and Spectroscopy Explorer) instrument suite will analyze the domes’ geology to understand how they formed.

Draper’s Farside Mission (CP-12)

In 2026, a team led by Draper will attempt the first U.S. landing on the far side of the Moon. Acting as the prime contractor, Draper is overseeing a mission that will use the APEX 1.0 lander designed by its partner, ispace. The destination is Schrödinger Basin, a massive, 200-mile-diameter impact crater near the south pole that shows evidence of geologically recent volcanic activity. The lander will deploy a powerful geophysical station designed to take the first comprehensive measurements of the far side’s interior. The payloads include the Farside Seismic Suite (FSS) to listen for moonquakes, the Lunar Interior Temperature and Materials Suite (LITMS) to measure heat flowing from the Moon’s core, and the LuSEE-Lite instrument to study the region’s unique plasma and magnetic environment.

The slate of upcoming missions demonstrates a clear maturation of the CLPS program. It is evolving from proving that commercial companies can land on the Moon to using those capabilities to conduct sophisticated, targeted science in frontier locations. The deep integration of international partners on these missions also signals that CLPS is becoming a primary vehicle for global access to the lunar surface, positioning the United States as a central hub for a new era of international lunar research.

The table below organizes the complex manifest of upcoming missions, providing a clear roadmap of the program’s future.

Paving the Way for Artemis

The CLPS initiative is not a standalone science program; it is inextricably linked to NASA’s Artemis program and its goal of returning humans to the Moon. The robotic missions are explicitly described as precursors that perform essential reconnaissance and technology demonstrations, paving the way for the arrival of astronauts. In this capacity, CLPS functions as a critical risk-reduction program for the far more complex and costly endeavor of human spaceflight.

Scouting, Characterization, and Technology Testing

CLPS missions are strategically sent to locations of high interest for both science and future human exploration, with a particular focus on the lunar south pole—the same region targeted for the first Artemis crewed landings. These robotic scouts gather vital data on the local terrain, lighting conditions, communication challenges, and potential hazards, effectively mapping the territory before astronauts arrive.

Furthermore, the robotic landers serve as testbeds for technologies that are essential for a sustainable human presence. This includes precision landing and hazard avoidance systems, like the one used on the IM-1 mission, which are necessary for safely setting down large human landers near pre-selected resources. It also includes instruments designed for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), such as the drills on the IM-2 and canceled VIPER missions, which were intended to prospect for water ice. Finding and learning how to extract resources like water would dramatically alter the architecture of a future lunar base, as it could be used for life support and converted into rocket propellant.

Understanding the Hostile Lunar Environment

Finally, CLPS payloads are designed to characterize the harsh lunar environment to help engineers design safer systems for astronauts. Instruments measure the intense deep-space radiation, the extreme temperature swings between lunar day and night, and the behavior of the Moon’s abrasive, electrostatically charged dust, known as regolith. Data on how rocket engine plumes interact with this dust, collected by the SCALPSS instrument on multiple flights, is vital for designing landing pads and preventing damage to nearby hardware during future takeoffs and landings. Every piece of data returned by a CLPS lander helps reduce the “unknown unknowns” for the Artemis missions. This strategy of using a fleet of relatively low-cost robotic precursors to test equipment and survey the landscape directly mirrors the successful Surveyor-to-Apollo approach of the 1960s, but reimagined with a 21st-century commercial model.

Summary

NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative marks a fundamental change in the nation’s strategy for exploring the cosmos. By purchasing delivery services from a competitive pool of private companies, the agency is fostering an innovative commercial model designed to provide faster, more frequent, and more affordable access to the lunar surface.

The program’s early flights have been a story of rapid, iterative progress, defined by a high tolerance for risk. The journey from the initial failure of the Peregrine mission to the partial success of Odysseus and the ultimate triumph of Blue Ghost demonstrated a steep learning curve, validating the commercial approach of launching, learning, and improving.

Looking forward, CLPS is evolving from technology demonstration into a sophisticated science platform, with missions targeting the Moon’s most mysterious and challenging locations, from the radio-quiet far side to unique volcanic domes. In doing so, the program serves a vital dual purpose. It is conducting groundbreaking lunar science in its own right, while simultaneously laying the essential groundwork for the return of astronauts under the Artemis program. By scouting landing sites, testing critical technologies, and characterizing the lunar environment, CLPS is reducing the risks for human explorers and helping to enable a sustainable, long-term human presence on the Moon and, eventually, Mars.