What is NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program?

The New Moon Rush

For half a century, the lunar surface remained untouched by American hardware. Since the crew of Apollo 17 kicked up the dust of the Taurus-Littrow valley in 1972, a long, quiet pause settled over American lunar exploration. That pause is now over. In 2018, NASA established the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, a program designed not just to return to the Moon, but to fundamentally rewrite the rules for how to get there.

CLPS is NASA’s answer to a new era. The program’s function is straightforward: NASA is working with a pool of American companies to acquire “commercial delivery services” to transport its scientific, exploration, and technology payloads to the surface and orbit of the Moon. This isn’t a traditional NASA mission in the vein of Apollo or the Mars rovers. It’s an entirely new model, one that outsources the launch, the lander, and the landing operations to a growing private industry. The goal is to change how the agency works and performs science at the Moon, dramatically expanding its capabilities for discovery.

This initiative is the robotic vanguard of NASA’s broader Artemis campaign, which plans to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon. Before astronauts take their next steps, these commercial landers are sent ahead as scouts. They are tasked with laying the foundation for that human presence, testing the technologies astronauts will need, and exploring the lunar environment to provide critical insights for future crewed missions.

The scale of this effort is substantial. NASA has already awarded over a dozen delivery contracts to its commercial partners. The current manifest projects the delivery of more than 60 NASA instruments to the Moon by 2028, targeting diverse and scientifically rich locations, from the resource-rich South Pole to the volcanic plains of the near side and the radio-quiet mystery of the far side.

This program represents a significant philosophical shift for NASA. The agency that once managed every bolt and calculation of the Saturn V rocket is stepping back from the role of builder and operator. Instead, it is becoming a customer, and, it hopes, just one customer of many. By purchasing “shots on goal” from multiple vendors, NASA is accepting a higher level of risk to achieve a higher cadence of missions at a fraction of the cost. This strategy is explicitly designed to stimulate the American commercial space industry and foster a self-sustaining lunar economy. CLPS is not just about landing science; it’s about building a marketplace on the Moon.

Buying a Delivery Service: A New ‘Shots on Goal’ Philosophy

The Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative works on a unique business model that is central to its purpose and its risks. NASA is not designing or building lunar landers. It is buying an “end-to-end delivery service” from its commercial partners. This is a important distinction that redefines the agency’s role in exploration.

When NASA awards a CLPS task order, it is purchasing a complete, door-to-door service. The commercial vendor – not NASA – is responsible for everything. This includes designing and manufacturing the robotic lunar lander, integrating NASA’s scientific payloads onto the spacecraft, procuring a launch vehicle from a provider like SpaceX or United Launch Alliance, and conducting all mission operations, from launch and cislunar cruise to the final, autonomous descent and landing on the Moon’s surface.

These are explicitly not NASA missions. They are commercial missions, owned, managed, and controlled by the company that flies them. The landers are licensed by U.S. government agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), not by NASA’s internal flight readiness reviews. NASA’s role is that of a client, providing the payloads and a check upon successful delivery.

This model is a radical departure from NASA’s traditional “flagship” missions, such as the Perseverance rover on Mars or the James Webb Space Telescope. Those multi-billion-dollar projects are built on a “cost-plus” contract model. NASA manages every step, mitigates nearly all risk, and reimburses the contractor for its expenses plus a fee. This approach produces incredibly reliable, one-of-a-kind marvels of engineering, but it is also notoriously slow and expensive. A 2022 Government Accountability Office report noted that just three of these flagship-style programs – the James Webb Space Telescope, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and the Orion crew capsule – were responsible for a combined $12 billion in cost overruns and years of schedule delays.

CLPS inverts this logic. The program is built on firm-fixed-price (FFP) contracts. NASA and a vendor agree on a single price for the delivery, and that’s what the company gets paid. If the company exceeds its budget, it absorbs the loss. This contractual mechanism provides a powerful incentive for vendors to be fast, cost-effective, and innovative. It also transfers the vast majority of financial and programmatic risk from the taxpayer directly onto the company’s balance sheet.

This high-risk, high-reward approach is known within NASA as the “shots on goal” philosophy. Instead of spending a decade and two billion dollars on a single, “must-not-fail” lander, NASA is spreading its $2.6 billion CLPS budget across more than a dozen smaller, faster, and cheaper missions. The agency’s goal is to manage its risk exposure rather than eliminate all risk.

The strategy, as outlined by the agency, has two main pillars. First, for the initial deliveries, NASA would fly instruments that were low-cost and non-critical, but still scientifically useful. If a lander failed, the scientific loss would be minimized. Second, the program would start by developing small-to-medium-sized landers first. Only after these companies had learned the hard lessons of landing on the Moon would NASA progress to awarding missions for larger, more complex payloads.

The cost-benefit analysis is stark. Thomas Zurbuchen, the former NASA executive who started the CLPS program, laid out the math. The first four CLPS missions – which included one total failure, two partial successes, and one complete success – cost NASA a combined $386 million. For a “fraction of the cost” of a single $2 billion flagship mission, NASA had already created multiple landing successes, flown dozens of instruments, and, most importantly, generated a massive amount of real-world data and flight experience. Even with a high failure rate, this model allows NASA to get more science to the Moon, more often, for less money.

The entire program is built on an Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract, which functions as a pre-qualified vendor pool. This IDIQ, which has a cumulative maximum contract value of $2.6 billion through 2028, allows NASA to solicit bids for new “task orders” only from companies that have already been vetted and added to the list.

A central tension has emerged from this model. While CLPS was designed to be “hands-off,” with NASA having only limited insight into the vendor’s development, the agency’s own institutional culture is famously risk-averse. A 2024 report from the NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that NASA had, in fact, “deviated from its original, hands-off strategy.” The agency added requirements for “augmented insight” and implemented more “risk-averse practices and policies.” These deviations, made with the good intention of ensuring mission success, directly led to “higher costs and delayed delivery schedules,” undermining the program’s core goals of speed and low cost. This internal conflict, between the new commercial philosophy and NASA’s old flagship culture, has become a recurring challenge for the program.

Early Realities: The Vendor Shakeout

The high-stakes, firm-fixed-price model of the CLPS program was tested almost immediately, and not just in space. Before a single lander left Earth, the program’s free-market approach began to filter the vendor pool, demonstrating that the “shots on goal” philosophy applied not only to the hardware but to the companies building it.

In May 2019, NASA announced the first three companies to win CLPS task orders: Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, and a New Jersey-based company called OrbitBeyond. OrbitBeyond was awarded a $97 million contract to deliver four payloads to a lava plain in Mare Imbrium, with a launch scheduled for 2020. The selection was a major vote of confidence.

Just two months later, in July 2019, the plan unraveled. OrbitBeyond abruptly informed NASA that it would be unable to complete the task order. Citing “internal corporate challenges,” the company requested to be released from the contract. NASA terminated the task order, which was mutually agreeable to both parties. While OrbitBeyond technically remains one of the 14 companies eligible to bid on future missions, it has not been awarded another contract. The episode served as an immediate, sharp warning of the volatility and difficulty of the commercial lunar business.

A more dramatic test of the model came three years later. Masten Space Systems, a respected aerospace firm with a long history of rocket development, was awarded a $75.9 million task order in April 2020. The company was contracted to use its XL-1 lunar lander to deliver a suite of NASA payloads, including a small rover, to the lunar south pole by late 2022.

In July 2022, Masten Space Systems filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company’s failure was a direct and painful consequence of the program’s firm-fixed-price structure. Subsequent court filings and reports revealed that Masten had “grossly underbid” the mission. It had submitted a $79.5 million bid for a project it internally estimated would cost significantly more. This low bid was based on an “unsupported assumption” that the company would be able to secure other, non-NASA commercial payloads to fly on the same mission, which would cover the financial gap.

When those commercial sales didn’t materialize quickly enough, and with the NASA award not covering the full cost of the mission, the company’s financial position became untenable. Compounded by pandemic-era supply chain disruptions, Masten ran out of money. The CLPS contract, designed to foster commercial success, had instead triggered the company’s financial collapse. In the ensuing bankruptcy auction, Masten’s assets and intellectual property were acquired by its CLPS competitor, Astrobotic Technology, for $4.5 million. Masten’s CLPS mission was officially canceled.

These failures were not seen by NASA as a flaw in the CLPS model, but rather as the model working as intended. Agency officials, including Thomas Zurbuchen, had stated from the beginning that they were “willing to accept some risk” and knew that some missions and providers “may not always succeed.” The FFP contract acted as a harsh, real-world selection filter. It was designed to discover which companies could actually build and fly a lander on a fixed budget, not just which ones were good at writing proposals. This painful shakeout was a low-cost (for NASA) method of identifying the most viable long-term partners.

This process had an important ripple effect. The NASA OIG report noted that the Masten bankruptcy created a new challenge. NASA officials speculated that the remaining vendors, having watched a competitor go bankrupt, would be less willing to take financial risks. They would likely “raise their proposed task order costs” in future bids to ensure their own survival. This created a new strain on the CLPS budget, threatening the “low-cost” part of the “low-cost, high-cadence” model. The program was learning in real-time how to balance its desire for low prices against the commercial realities of keeping its vendor base solvent.

The Pioneers: Profiles of the CLPS Providers

The CLPS initiative is built upon a diverse portfolio of 14 American companies, which were selected in two batches. This pool of vendors forms the IDIQ contract, making them eligible to compete for individual mission task orders.

The initial group of nine companies was selected in November 2018:

• Astrobotic Technology
• Deep Space Systems
• Draper
• Firefly Aerospace
• Intuitive Machines
• Lockheed Martin Space
• Masten Space Systems
• Moon Express
• OrbitBeyond

One year later, in November 2019, NASA held an “on-ramp” to add five more vendors to the pool, expanding the program’s potential capabilities:

• Blue Origin
• Ceres Robotics
• Sierra Nevada Corporation (now Sierra Space)
• SpaceX
• Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems

From this pool, a clear tiered ecosystem has emerged, defined by the companies that have successfully won flight contracts. These active providers range from small pathfinders to heavy-lift titans, reflecting NASA’s progressive strategy of starting small and scaling up.

Astrobotic Technology: Peregrine and Griffin

Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Astrobotic Technology was founded in 2007 and has become a cornerstone of the CLPS program. The company has developed two distinct lander classes.

The Peregrine Lander is Astrobotic’s small-class vehicle. It’s a stout, aluminum-structured lander designed for rapid, lower-cost deliveries. Standing about 1.9 meters tall, it uses five main engines and is designed to carry a payload mass of 90 kg to 120 kg to the lunar surface. Peregrine was selected for the very first CLPS flight, Peregrine Mission One, serving as the program’s initial pathfinder.

The Griffin Lander is a much larger, medium-class lander. It was specifically designed to be a heavy-payload “workhorse” for the CLPS fleet, capable of delivering around 625 kg to the Moon. Its large size and payload capacity made it the original choice for one of NASA’s most important payloads: the VIPER rover.

Intuitive Machines: The Nova-C Lander

Intuitive Machines is a Houston-based company that has quickly become a high-cadence provider for CLPS, securing multiple task orders. Their primary vehicle is the Nova-C Lander.

The Nova-C is a science and discovery-class lander. It stands 4.3 meters (14 feet) tall, has a hexagonal cylinder shape, and is supported by six landing legs. It is designed to deliver payloads of 100 kg to 130 kg to the lunar surface.

The Nova-C’s most significant technological innovation is its propulsion system. It is the first spacecraft to successfully use liquid oxygen (LOx) and liquid methane (methalox) as its propellant in deep space. This is a major technical demonstration for the entire space industry. Methalox is a high-performance propellant that is more stable and cleaner than traditional hypergolic fuels. It is also considered a prime candidate for “in-situ resource utilization,” as future explorers hope to one day manufacture methane and oxygen from resources found on the Moon or Mars. The flight-proven success of the Nova-C’s methalox engine is a key stepping stone toward that future.

Firefly Aerospace: The Blue Ghost Lander

Firefly Aerospace, based in Cedar Park, Texas, is developing the Blue Ghost Lander for its CLPS deliveries. This is a medium-class lander, standing approximately 2 meters (6.6 feet) tall and 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) wide, giving it a low center of gravity. It is powered by three solar panels that generate 400 watts of power and uses a propulsion system with thrusters built in-house.

Firefly’s key innovation lies not just in its lander, but in its mission architecture. For its second mission, Firefly will also use its Elytra orbital transfer vehicle. This vehicle will fly to the Moon carrying both the Blue Ghostlander and a separate orbital satellite. The Elytra will first deploy the satellite into lunar orbit and then release the lander to begin its descent. The Elytra vehicle will then remain in orbit, repositioning itself to serve as a vital communications relay for the lander on the surface. This “2-in-1” capability – delivering both an orbiter and a lander in a single mission – represents a significant leap in commercial capability, especially for complex missions to the lunar far side.

Draper and ispace: A Far Side Partnership

The Draper-led team is a prime example of a specialized partnership formed to tackle one of CLPS’s most difficult challenges. The prime contractor is Draper, a non-profit research and development company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, legendary for developing the Apollo Guidance Computer that took the first astronauts to the Moon.

In this partnership, Draper serves as the mission’s leader, providing program management, systems engineering, and its world-class Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) system. The lander itself is provided by a partner: ispace-U.S. This Denver-based firm, the U.S. arm of a Japanese company, designs and builds the lander, which is named APEX 1.0 (formerly designated SERIES-2). This team was specifically assembled to bid for and win a complex task order to land on the lunar far side, a feat requiring extreme precision and a dedicated communications solution.

Blue Origin

Blue Origin, the Kent, Washington-based company founded by Jeff Bezos, joined the CLPS provider pool in the 2019 “on-ramp.” The company brings a heavy-lift capability to the program with its Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) Lander.

The MK1 is a large-class cargo lander, significantly bigger and more capable than the initial pathfinder landers. It is designed to launch on Blue Origin’s own New Glenn heavy-lift rocket, creating a vertically integrated launch and landing ecosystem. The Blue Moon lander is intended for NASA’s largest and most valuable robotic payloads, such as major infrastructure components and high-priority rovers.

This roster of providers reveals a clear, tiered ecosystem that NASA has cultivated, perfectly reflecting the program’s “progressive” risk strategy.

• Tier 1 (Pathfinders): Astrobotic’s Peregrine and Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C are the small, ~100-kg-class landers. They were the first to fly, acting as the program’s test pilots, absorbing the initial risk and learning the first hard lessons.
• Tier 2 (Workhorses): Firefly’s Blue Ghost and Astrobotic’s Griffin are the larger, medium-class landers. They are designed to carry more complex payloads, especially the rovers that will be the next step in exploration.
• Tier 3 (Titans): Blue Origin’s Blue Moon (and potentially SpaceX, which is also in the pool) represents the heavy-lift class. These providers are intended for high-value, “must-not-fail” payloads and the large-scale infrastructure needed to support a human presence.

The “shots on goal” philosophy moved from theory to dramatic, public practice in 2024 and 2025. The first four CLPS missions unfolded in rapid succession, providing a real-world, high-stakes test of the new commercial model. The results were a mix of catastrophic failure, flawed success, and, ultimately, clear validation.

The Agony of Peregrine

The first CLPS mission to launch was Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One (Task Order TO2-AB). On January 8, 2024, the Peregrine lander lifted off from Cape Canaveral on the historic, long-awaited maiden flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket. The launch was flawless, and the lander successfully separated from the rocket to begin its solo journey.

Just seven hours later, the mission was over. Astrobotic’s mission control reported a critical propulsion system anomaly. A “critical loss of propellant” was detected, and analysis showed the lander was unable to achieve a stable orientation to point its solar panels toward the Sun to charge its batteries. A photograph taken by the lander itself and sent back to Earth showed a “visual clue” of the problem: a clear disturbance in the spacecraft’s outer insulation, indicating a rupture.

A post-mission investigation board pinpointed the cause. A single component, a helium pressure control valve, had failed to reseal after its initial activation. This allowed high-pressure helium to rush uncontrollably into the oxidizer tank, pressurizing it “beyond its operating limit” until the tank ruptured. The review board concluded this mechanical failure was likely caused by “vibration-initiated” loosening of the valve’s internal components during the rocket launch.

With no chance of reaching the Moon, the Astrobotic team shifted its goals. They successfully stabilized the spacecraft and managed to turn its solar panels toward the Sun, fully charging its batteries. They salvaged the mission as a 10-day test flight in cislunar space. In that time, they successfully powered on and collected data from nine of the onboard payloads. To prevent the crippled lander from becoming a long-term debris hazard in cislunar space, Astrobotic’s engineers performed a final series of maneuvers to direct it into Earth’s atmosphere. On January 18, 10 days after its launch, Peregrine burned up in a controlled re-entry over a remote area of the South Pacific. It was a total landing failure, but a partial systems success that provided invaluable data on the lander’s other subsystems.

Odysseus on its Side: A Historic, Flawed Success

Just weeks after Peregrine’s failure, the pressure was on Intuitive Machines. Their IM-1 mission (Task Order TO2-IM), carrying a Nova-C lander named Odysseus, launched on February 15, 2024, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The mission proceeded perfectly through its launch and cruise to the Moon. But as Odysseus orbited the Moon preparing for its final descent, mission controllers discovered a potentially fatal problem: the lander’s primary navigation sensors, its laser rangefinders, were not working. An investigation determined that a physical safety switch on the instruments had not been flipped during pre-launch preparations on Earth. The lander was flying blind, unable to see the surface it was about to attempt to land on.

In an extraordinary display of real-time problem-solving, flight controllers at Intuitive Machines and NASA devised a desperate fix. One of the NASA payloads Odysseus was carrying was an experimental technology demonstration called the Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL). This instrument was designed to test a new method of precise landing, but it was just a passenger; it was never intended to control the lander. In a matter of hours, engineers wrote and uploaded a complex software patch to Odysseus. The patch commanded the lander’s flight computer to reroute its primary navigation, taking the data from the NASA NDL payload and “feeding” it to the lander’s main engine as its new “eyes.”

On February 22, 2024, the world watched as the improvised solution was put to the test. It worked. Odysseussuccessfully fired its engine, descended, and touched down near the Malapert A crater in the lunar south pole region. The landing was a monumental, history-making achievement. It was the first-ever soft landing on the Moon by a private company and the first American spacecraft to land on the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972. For the first time in over 50 years, NASA was collecting science data from the Moon’s surface.

The landing was not perfect. The last-minute software patch, combined with the challenging terrain, resulted in a rough landing. Odysseus came in faster than intended, caught one of its six landing legs on the surface, skidded, and tipped over. It came to rest at a 30-degree angle, propped up against a small rock.

Despite its sideways orientation, Odysseus was alive and functional. Its solar panels were still receiving some sunlight, and its antennas were (mostly) pointed in the right direction. It successfully maintained communication with Earth and, over the next seven days, collected and returned data from all of its active NASA payloads. It operated until the lunar night fell, silencing it for good. The IM-1 mission was a flawed, nerve-wracking, and ultimately historic success.

Blue Ghost: The First ‘Mission Accomplished’

The third CLPS mission, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 (Task Order TO19D), provided a much-needed, unqualified success. Blue Ghost launched on January 15, 2025, and took a much different path. Instead of a short, high-energy “sprint” to the Moon, Firefly opted for a 45-day, low-energy trajectory.

This patient approach proved to be a brilliant strategic move. It gave mission controllers 25 days in Earth orbit and another 16 days in lunar orbit to perform exhaustive health checks, calibrations, and system checkouts on every part of the lander. By the time Blue Ghost was ready to land, the team was completely confident in its hardware.

On March 2, 2025, the lander executed a flawless, autonomous descent and touched down upright, safe, and fully operational near Mons Latreille in the Mare Crisium basin.

This was the “mission accomplished” moment the CLPS program had been waiting for. It was the first fully successful commercial landing in history. Blue Ghost operated for its entire 14-Earth-day primary mission, logging 346 hours of continuous daylight operations. It successfully powered, operated, and returned all data from its 10 NASA payloads, transmitting over 110 GB of science back to Earth. In a final demonstration of its robust design, the lander continued to function for an additional five hours into the frigid, -173°C (-280°F) lunar night before its batteries were finally depleted. The mission was a complete success from start to finish, providing the ultimate validation that the CLPS commercial model could work perfectly.

The IM-2 Tumble and the Fate of PRIME-1

The fourth flight, Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission (Task Order PRIME-1), was a high-priority science mission. Its lander, named Athena, launched on February 27, 2025, carrying NASA’s Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1). This payload included a meter-long drill, and its goal was to be the first instrument to ever drill for and analyze water ice from below the lunar surface.

On March 6, 2025, Athena successfully reached its landing site at Mons Mouton, achieving the southernmost lunar landing in history, even closer to the pole than Odysseus.

Tragically, the landing itself was a repeat of IM-1. The lander tipped over as it touched down, coming to rest on its side inside a small crater. The company’s post-mission analysis determined the cause was not a hardware failure, but an environmental one. The landing site’s extreme southern latitude meant the Sun was very low on the horizon, creating “challenging lighting conditions” and “long shadows” that confused the lander’s navigation system.

Because of its sideways orientation and location inside a crater, Athena’s solar panels could not get enough light. The mission ended after only 12 hours of surface operations. Most importantly, the PRIME-1 drill, the mission’s entire reason for being, could not be deployed while the lander was on its side. The payload was lost, representing a major scientific setback.

These first four missions are a perfect, real-world microcosm of the “shots on goal” philosophy. The scorecard: one total failure, two partial successes, and one total success. This cost NASA $386 million. A single flagship mission could have cost five times that and, if it failed, would have returned nothing. This model, while messy, is delivering hardware to the Moon and, critically, generating flight experience at a rapid pace.

The data from these landings also revealed a vital, hard-learned lesson: landing at the lunar south pole is substantially more difficult than landing at mid-latitudes. Both mid-latitude attempts (one failed from a valve, one succeeded perfectly) were not felled by the environment. In contrast, both landings at the south pole (IM-1 and IM-2) tipped over, with the IM-2 failure being directly blamed on the polar lighting and shadows. The CLPS scouts are fulfilling their primary purpose: discovering the harsh realities of the Artemis landing zones beforehuman lives are put at risk.

No single project better illustrates the programmatic clash within the CLPS initiative than the story of the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER. This high-profile mission’s dramatic cancellation and subsequent revival serve as a powerful case study of the tension between NASA’s new commercial model and its traditional, risk-averse “flagship” culture.

VIPER was not just another payload. It was a NASA-managed, high-priority science mission, a golf-cart-sized rover designed to be the agency’s premier water-hunter. Its mission was to drive into the treacherous, permanently shadowed regions of the lunar south pole – areas that haven’t seen sunlight in billions of years. Once there, it would use its meter-long drill to search for and map the extent of subsurface water ice. This data was considered fundamental to the Artemis program, as this ice is the key resource future astronauts plan to “live off the land,” harvesting it for drinking water, breathable air, and rocket propellant.

In 2020, NASA awarded Astrobotic a $199.5 million CLPS task order (TO20A) to deliver VIPER to the Moon. To carry the heavy, 450-kilogram rover, Astrobotic would use its new, larger Griffin lander, with a launch planned for 2023.

The mission quickly ran into the harsh realities of developing a brand-new, medium-class lander. In 2022, NASA announced it was delaying the launch to late 2024, citing the need for more ground testing of the Griffinlander. Meanwhile, the VIPER rover itself, managed directly by NASA, was experiencing its own development problems. Its cost ballooned from an initial $250 million estimate to over $450 million. The mission was delayed again, with its readiness date pushed to September 2025.

On July 17, 2024, NASA made a stunning announcement: it was discontinuing the VIPER project. The agency cited the mounting “cost increases, delays… and the risks of future cost growth.” The core problem was that the expensive, delayed rover was putting a financial squeeze on the entire CLPS program. NASA’s official statement noted that continuing VIPER “would result in an increased cost that threatens cancellation or disruption to other CLPS missions.”

The project was canceled because it violated the core philosophy of CLPS. The CLPS model was designed for small, 10-15 kg payloads – cheap, fast, and expendable “shots on goal.” VIPER was a 500-kg, half-billion-dollar flagship rover. It was a square peg being forced into a round hole.

Because VIPER was so expensive and scientifically vital, NASA’s risk-averse culture took over. The agency couldn’t remain “hands-off.” It demanded “augmented insight” and more and more testing, which in turn caused the delays and cost growth that bogged down Astrobotic’s fixed-price contract. The two programmatic cultures – low-cost commercial and high-cost flagship – were incompatible, and the project broke under the strain.

The cancellation sent shockwaves through the scientific community, which saw VIPER as essential. Scientists and space advocates lobbied Congress to save the mission. In response, NASA sought new proposals, this time looking for a partner that could handle such a high-value asset.

On September 19, 2025, NASA announced that VIPER was revived. The agency had awarded a new $190 million task order (CS-7) to Blue Origin. The private spaceflight company will now deliver VIPER to the south pole in late 2027 using its heavy-lift Blue Moon Mark 1 lander.

This decision was a “flight to safety.” NASA effectively moved its most valuable robotic asset from a Tier 1/2 vendor (Astrobotic) to a Tier 3 “titan” (Blue Origin), a company backed by immense private capital and developing a much larger lander. This move validated the tiered-ecosystem approach, creating a new precedent: while the smaller, pathfinder companies would continue to take the “shots on goal” with smaller payloads, NASA’s most expensive, “must-not-fail” missions would be entrusted to its largest, most financially stable partners.

Astrobotic’s original task order, TO20A, was modified. Its Griffin lander will still fly as a technology demonstration to the south pole. But instead of VIPER, it will carry a mass simulator to prove it can handle the load. In a sign of the commercial model’s resilience, Astrobotic announced it had sold the new “primary payload” spot on this mission to a purely commercial customer: Venturi Astrolab, which will be flying its own private FLIP rover.

An Ecosystem of Payloads: Science, Commerce, and Art

The landers themselves are only half of the CLPS story. The other half is the diverse, eclectic, and strategically vital collection of payloads they carry. The manifests of the CLPS missions are a “patchwork quilt” of high-end science, critical technology, and growing commercial enterprise, reflecting the program’s multiple goals.

NASA’s Scientific Toolkit

The primary source for NASA’s CLPS science instruments is the Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon (PRISM) program. This is the official solicitation through which NASA’s Science Mission Directorate requests and selects instrument proposals from universities and NASA centers. These PRISM payloads are then assigned to upcoming CLPS flights.

The instruments selected cover the full spectrum of lunar science, with a clear focus on preparing for human exploration.

• Water Ice (In-Situ Resource Utilization): The hunt for water ice is a top priority. Key payloads include the PRIME-1 drill suite (which was lost on IM-2), the Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS) to detect hydrogen below the surface, the Near-Infrared Volatiles Spectrometer System (NIRVSS) to identify the composition of ices, and the TRIDENT drill.
• Geology & Interior: Understanding the Moon’s internal structure and “moonquakes.” This category includes the Farside Seismic Suite (FSS), the Lunar Interior Temperature and Materials Suite (LITMS) heat-flow probe, the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) to study the mantle, and the Lunar Vertex rover suite to investigate magnetic anomalies.
• Radiation Environment: Characterizing the harsh radiation on the lunar surface is essential for protecting astronauts. Payloads like the Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS) and the RadPCradiation-tolerant computer are measuring this environment and testing countermeasures.
• Exosphere & Plasma Physics: Studying the Moon’s paper-thin atmosphere (exosphere) and how it interacts with the solar wind. Instruments include the Peregrine Ion-Trap Mass Spectrometer (PITMS), the Radio-wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath (ROLSES), and the Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI).

Testing the Tools for Tomorrow

Just as important as the pure science are the technology demonstrations. These payloads are testing the specific hardware and software astronauts and future robots will need to operate on the Moon.

• Navigation: The Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL), the experimental payload that famously saved the IM-1 mission, proved a new method for precision landing. The Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), which flew on Blue Ghost, successfully used signals from Earth’s GPS and Galileo constellations to calculate a navigational fix near the Moon, a first-of-its-kind achievement. On nearly every flight, NASA also includes Laser Retroreflector Arrays (LRAs), small, mirrored targets that serve as permanent, passive location markers for future landers to range off of.
• Surface Operations: The Lunar PlanetVac (LPV), flown on Blue Ghost, tested a new way to collect regolith (soil) samples using a puff of compressed gas. The SAMPLR robotic arm, slated for a future flight, will be a critical test of robotic manipulation.
• Dust Mitigation: Lunar dust is angular, abrasive, and electrostatically charged, posing a severe threat to hardware. The Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS) and Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC)payloads are testing methods – from running electric currents across surfaces to testing new materials – to see what can repel this destructive dust.
• Lander Effects: The Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) is a set of cameras designed to watch the lander’s own rocket exhaust. It films how the engine blast scours the regolith, which is critical data for understanding how to land near other structures (like a future human habitat) without sandblasting them into oblivion.
• Propellant Gauging: The Radio Frequency Mass Gauge (RFMG), flown on IM-1, demonstrated a new technique for accurately measuring the amount of propellant left in a spacecraft’s tanks in microgravity – a notoriously difficult but vital task for long-duration missions.

The Commercial Manifest

Perhaps the most telling sign of the CLPS model’s impact is the manifest of non-NASA payloads. NASA explicitly encourages its vendors to sell any extra space on their landers to other customers. This is a core part of the business model, allowing companies to make up the revenue gaps on their firm-fixed-price contracts. These commercial payloads are the first true seeds of a lunar economy.

The results are an eclectic mix.

• Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One carried 21 total payloads, but only five were from NASA. The other 15 were from seven different countries, including universities, memorial flights (from Celestis, which flies cremated remains), and digital time capsules.
• Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander carried six NASA payloads and six commercial payloads. These included the EagleCam, a small camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University to film the landing; the Lunaprise time capsule; and “Moon Phases,” a set of 125 miniature sculptures by the artist Jeff Koons.
• The upcoming Griffin Mission One, which lost its VIPER primary payload, is now flying a commercialrover, Astrolab’s FLIP, as its new main payload.

This “patchwork quilt” of payloads is the delivery service model in action. A single lander is carrying billion-dollar NASA prototypes, student-built experiments, commercial art, and memorial services, all at the same time. This payload-stacking is how the vendors can attempt to close their business cases.

The non-NASA payloads are the true metric of the program’s long-term success. NASA’s stated goal is to be “one of many customers.” The real test is whether companies like Venturi Astrolab, Nokia (which flew a 4G/LTE network test on IM-2), or Lonestar (which flew a data center test on IM-1) can build viable businesses by buying rides to the Moon. The fact that Astrolab is now paying Astrobotic to deliver its rover is the first major sign that this non-NASA lunar economy is beginning to form.

The Future Manifest: To the Far Side and the Poles

With the “trial by fire” phase concluding, the CLPS program is now moving from simple landing demonstrations to a campaign of complex, high-stakes science. The future manifest, with task orders already awarded through 2028, shows a clear strategic evolution. The missions are targeting the Moon’s most valuable and challenging locations – the South Pole and the Far Side – and are designed to deliver not just static instruments, but mobility and complex robotic systems.

Probing the South Pole

The lunar south pole remains the primary target for the Artemis program, believed to hold vast reserves of water ice in its permanently shadowed craters. The next wave of CLPS missions is focused on prospecting this region.

• Astrobotic Griffin Mission One (TO20A): This is the mission originally intended for VIPER. Now re-tasked as a large lander demonstration, Astrobotic’s Griffin lander is scheduled for a July 2026 launch to the Nobile Crater region. Its primary payload is now the commercial FLIP (FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform) rover from Venturi Astrolab, which will be the first large-scale commercial rover on the Moon. The lander will also deploy Astrobotic’s own small CubeRover and payloads from the European Space Agency (ESA).
• Blue Origin Pathfinder Mission (CT-3): Blue Origin’s first Blue Moon Mark 1 lander is slated for a technology pathfinder flight in 2025 or 2026. This mission (Task Order CT-3) will deliver two NASA payloads to the south pole: the SCALPSS camera system to study the lander’s plume effects and a Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA).
• Intuitive Machines Mission 4 (CP-22): Scheduled for 2027, this Nova-C lander will return to the Mons Mouton region. It’s a major science mission (Task Order CP-22) carrying six payloads. The headliner is ESA’s PROSPECT drill suite, a spiritual successor to the lost PRIME-1. PROSPECT is designed to drill for and analyze subsurface volatiles. The mission will also carry LEIA (Lunar Explorer Instrument for Space Biology Applications), an experiment to study the response of yeast to lunar gravity and radiation, and the L-CIRiS infrared imager.
• Blue Origin VIPER Mission (CS-7): In late 2027, Blue Origin’s second Blue Moon MK1 lander will fly the resurrected VIPER rover (Task Order CS-7). This is the high-stakes delivery, launching the rover on its 100-day, ice-hunting robotic mission, finally fulfilling the science goal set years earlier.

The Radio-Quiet Far Side

The next great frontier of lunar exploration is the far side, the hemisphere that perpetually faces away from Earth. This region is shielded from our planet’s constant radio “noise,” making it the most pristine and valuable location in the inner solar system for radio astronomy. Landing and operating there is exceptionally difficult because it requires a dedicated communications relay satellite in lunar orbit. Two CLPS missions are designed to establish this capability.

• Draper Mission 1 (CP-12): Scheduled for late 2026, this mission is led by Draper as the prime contractor, using an APEX 1.0 lander from ispace-U.S. It will be the first American attempt to land on the far side, targeting the massive Schrödinger Basin. The mission (Task Order CP-12) will deploy its own relay satellites to communicate with Earth. On the surface, it will deploy a suite of three long-lived geophysical instruments: the Farside Seismic Suite (FSS) to listen for “moonquakes,” the LITMS heat-flow probe, and the LuSEE-Lite instrument.
• Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 2 (CS-3): In mid-2026, Firefly’s second mission (Task Order CS-3) will also head to the far side. This mission has a dual objective. First, Firefly’s Elytra orbital vehicle will deploy ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder satellite, a commercial-services communications orbiter. Second, the Blue Ghostlander will descend to the surface with three NASA payloads, headlined by the LuSEE-Night radio telescope. This instrument will use the “radio quiet” of the far side to attempt to observe faint radio signals from the cosmic “Dark Ages,” the period before the first stars in the universe ignited.

Investigating Geologic Mysteries

The final set of missions targets unique lunar features to answer fundamental questions about the Moon’s history.

• Intuitive Machines Mission 3 (CP-11): This mission, planned for early 2026, targets a “lunar swirl” known as Reiner Gamma. Swirls are strange, pale markings on the surface associated with local magnetic anomalies. To investigate this mystery, the Nova-C lander (Task Order CP-11) will deliver the Lunar Vertex payload, a joint lander-rover suite. A magnetometer on the lander will take stationary readings while a small rover drives across the swirl, mapping the magnetic field and analyzing the regolith.
• Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 3 (CP-21): Scheduled for 2028, this flight (Task Order CP-21) will target the Gruithuisen Domes. These domes are a geologic mystery: they appear to be volcanic, but remote sensing shows they are made of silica-rich magma, a type of rock that, on Earth, requires liquid water and plate tectonics to form. The Blue Ghost lander will deliver six payloads, including the Lunar-VISE instrument suite (mounted on both the lander and a rover) and the SAMPLR robotic arm, to analyze the domes’ composition and try to solve this lunar puzzle.

This future manifest clearly demonstrates that the CLPS program is evolving. The initial phase of “just land” is over. NASA is now confident enough in its commercial partners to commission missions that require advanced capabilities:

• Mobility: Delivering a fleet of sophisticated rovers (FLIP, Lunar Vertex, Lunar-VISE, VIPER).
• Complex Operations: Deploying robotic arms (SAMPLR) and drills (PROSPECT).
• Extreme Environments: Tackling the operational and communications challenge of the lunar far side.

This is the “incremental progress” strategy in action. The program is successfully moving from simple delivery to building out a network of complex, semi-permanent robotic science stations that will pave the way for astronauts.

Despite its successes, the CLPS initiative is still navigating significant challenges. The 2024 NASA OIG report highlighted the program’s “growing pains.” While making progress, the initiative has seen total costs increase by over $200 million and schedules slip by an average of 14 months per task order.

The OIG’s key finding was that these problems were largely self-inflicted, caused by NASA’s “deviation from its original, hands-off strategy.” By adding layers of oversight and changing requirements – most notably for the VIPER mission – NASA’s own risk-averse culture created the very delays and cost increases the “low-cost, high-speed” model was designed to avoid. Managing this internal cultural conflict remains the program’s greatest management challenge.

Economically, the program has been a success at “democratizing space,” giving far more scientists and principal investigators the opportunity to fly instruments than the old flagship model ever could. However, the OIG noted that the lunar delivery market is still “heavily dependent on NASA task orders to remain financially viable.” The ultimate question – whether these companies can build a real business model beyond NASA – remains unanswered.

This all unfolds in a tense geopolitical context. CLPS does not exist in a vacuum; it is a key component in a new international space race for lunar resources, scientific knowledge, and prestige.

• China’s Chang’e Program: The U.S. commercial model is in direct competition with China’s highly successful, state-run Chang’e program. China has already executed multiple, flawless robotic landings and a sample-return mission. It is now planning to build its own robotic lunar research station at the south pole, in partnership with Russia, via its upcoming Chang’e 7 and 8 missions.
• India’s Chandrayaan Program: India’s state-run ISRO also achieved a major national triumph with the successful landing of its Chandrayaan-3 mission. It is planning sophisticated follow-ups, including a sample-return mission and a joint polar rover with Japan (LUPEX).

The CLPS model is America’s asymmetric response to this competition. Instead of trying to beat China’s state-run model with another, similar state-run model, the U.S. is leveraging its unique economic strength: its dynamic and innovative commercial sector. The “shots on goal” philosophy is a strategy to out-innovate and out-pace monolithic state-run competitors through a higher number of attempts, rapid iteration, and parallel development by multiple companies at once. CLPS is the American industrial strategy for the Moon.

This strategy is enabled by the Artemis Accords, the U.S-led policy framework for this new era. The Accords, signed by over 50 nations, establish a set of principles for “peaceful, safe, and sustainable” lunar exploration. They were created specifically in response to this new wave of activity by both governments and private companies. Critically, the Accords reinforce the legality of space resource utilization.

This legal framework is the essential “other half” of the CLPS program. The Artemis Accords provide the policy, while CLPS provides the practice. By creating international consensus that utilizing lunar resources like water ice is permissible, the Accords provide the regulatory certainty that commercial CLPS vendors and their investors need to build a long-term business case.

Summary

The Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, born in 2018, has in a few short years matured from a radical experiment into the operational backbone of America’s return to the Moon. The program’s “trial by fire” phase in 2024 and 2025 was a public and often painful demonstration of its core “shots on goal” philosophy. The catastrophic loss of Peregrine, the tipped-over landings of Odysseus and Athena, and the programmatic chaos of the VIPER rover were not signs of the program’s failure. They were the expected and necessary “tuition” paid for building a brand-new, multi-billion-dollar industrial capability from scratch – all for a fraction of the cost of a single traditional mission.

The unqualified, “mission accomplished” success of Firefly’s Blue Ghost mission provided the ultimate validation: the commercial model works. The program has successfully weathered early vendor bankruptcies and major payload cancellations to emerge with a proven, resilient, and multi-tiered industrial base.

Today, NASA’s focus is no longer on if its commercial partners can reach the Moon, but on what they can accomplish there. The future manifest – a complex roadmap of rovers, drills, robotic arms, and far-side observatories – shows that CLPS has evolved. It is no longer just an experiment in procurement. It is the essential, operational, and logistical vanguard for the entire Artemis era, scouting the terrain and laying the groundwork for the human explorers who will soon follow.