What Is NASA’s Commercial Mars Payload Services Program?

A New Program for a New Mars Paradigm

A fundamental shift is underway in NASA’s long-term strategy for the Red Planet. This change was formally announced with the release of the agency’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget request, which established a new, dedicated line item: the Commercial Mars Payload Services (CMPS) program. This initiative, which is moving from a long-discussed concept to a funded reality, represents a new paradigm for how the United States explores Mars.

The budget proposal allocated $200 million to formally begin the CMPS program. This initial funding is designated for a specific purpose: to start launching precursor missions and technology demonstrators to the Martian surface. These are not the large, flagship-class rovers like Curiosity or Perseverance that have defined Mars exploration for decades. Instead, this new approach is intended to “establish a regular cadence of science-driven, lower-cost mission and hosted instrument opportunities.”

In parallel to the $200 million for CMPS landers, the budget request also included a separate but deeply related $80 million. This funding is for the development of communications relay capabilities for Mars. The separation of these two items – payload services and communications services – is a clear signal that the CMPS initiative is not just about landing things on the surface. It’s about building a total, commercially-supplied, and enduring infrastructure around the planet.

This new program is not being managed by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD), the division that has traditionally overseen all robotic Mars exploration and which created the lunar-focused program on which CMPS is based. Instead, CMPS is being established within NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD). This is the same directorate that manages the agency’s core human spaceflight programs: the Artemis campaign, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and the Orion spacecraft.

This organizational placement is perhaps the most significant detail in the program’s creation. At the same time CMPS was created, ESDMD also took on responsibility for the existing Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which was transferred from the Science Mission Directorate. This move consolidates both of NASA’s commercial planetary service programs under the same roof as human exploration.

This consolidation reveals the true, long-term purpose of the new Mars strategy. By placing CMPS within the human exploration directorate, NASA is sending an unmistakable signal: this program is not just a cheaper way to conduct robotic science. It is a core component of the agency’s human exploration architecture. The robotic science payloads that will fly on CMPS missions are, in this new context, a convenient co-beneficiary. The primary, strategic purpose of CMPS is to serve as the logistical vanguard for the Moon to Mars (M2M) architecture – building the supply chain, testing the landing hardware, and proving the technologies, like the new communications relay, that astronauts will one day depend on.

The Moon to Mars Architecture: A Shift in Strategy

The Commercial Mars Payload Services program does not exist in a vacuum. It is a key, logical component of NASA’s overarching strategy for the next 50 years of human spaceflight: the Moon to Mars (M2M) architecture. This architecture is the agency’s unified roadmap, a grand plan that connects the Artemis program (the return of astronauts to the Moon) with the long-term, horizon goal of sending human missions to Mars.

The core of the M2M strategy is to use the Moon as a “proving ground.” This philosophy dictates that the Moon is not a final destination but a high-fidelity testbed for Mars. The technologies, systems, and operational practices required to survive on another world will be developed and refined on the lunar surface, just a three-day journey from Earth. This includes testing and validating long-duration surface habitats, pressurized rovers for exploration, and sustainable surface power systems – all components that will be necessary for a Martian expedition. By practicing for long-duration missions in the relative safety of the lunar environment, NASA can methodically address the risks of sending crews on a multi-year journey to Mars.

A key tenet of this entire architecture is a fundamental pivot toward deep commercial and international partnerships. This is not a new idea for NASA, but rather the culmination of a philosophical shift that has been accelerating for two decades. The agency’s successful reliance on private industry for low-Earth orbit (LEO) operations – seen in the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS), Commercial Resupply Services (CRS), and Commercial Crew programs that now ferry all U.S. cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station – has become the new blueprint.

The M2M architecture represents the final step in this evolution. It seeks to apply this same service-based, public-private partnership model to the far more complex and dangerous environments of deep space and planetary surfaces. The goal is to deliberately foster the expansion of the “economic sphere beyond Earth orbit.”

NASA is actively doing this through several mechanisms. The Artemis Accords, for example, create an international political and legal framework that establishes principles for the responsible and, importantly, commercial extraction of resources from the Moon and other celestial bodies. At the same time, procurement programs like the Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) are being used to fund the commercial development of deep-space capabilities, such as habitation modules.

The CMPS program, alongside its lunar counterpart CLPS, is the M2M architecture’s primary tool for extending this commercial model to a planetary surface. It is designed to build a sustainable, affordable, and service-based logistics chain to Mars. This represents a significant, long-term strategic bet by NASA. The agency is betting that the commercial market, driven by private capital, competition, and a tolerance for higher risk, will ultimately innovate faster and build hardware more cheaply than the traditional “cost-plus,” government-led contracting model that defined the 20th century. This philosophy is no longer an experiment; it is now the enshrined strategy of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, the organization responsible for executing this entire human exploration campaign.

The Lunar Precedent: A Deep Analysis of CLPS

To understand the future of the Commercial Mars Payload Services program, one must first conduct a deep analysis of the program it is explicitly modeled on: the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. CLPS is the blueprint. It is the grand experiment that provided both the inspiration for CMPS and a series of powerful, hard-won lessons that serve as its most significant cautionary tales.

The “Shots on Goal” Philosophy

Announced in 2018, CLPS is not a traditional NASA “mission.” It is, as the agency describes it, an “initiative” to “acquire delivery services.” This is a key distinction. Under this model, NASA does not design, build, or operate the spacecraft. It simply buys a ride for its science and technology payloads.

The program’s contract structure is the “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” (IDIQ) model. This created a pre-qualified pool of American companies (13 as of 2024) that are eligible to bid on specific “task orders” to deliver NASA payloads to the Moon.

These contracts are, most importantly, “firm-fixed-price” (FFP). NASA pays a single, set price for an end-to-end service. That service includes the launch, the lander spacecraft, and all mission operations. This model fundamentally shifts the financial risk. If a company overruns its budget, or if the mission fails to launch or land, the company (and its private investors) bear the financial loss, not the American taxpayer.

This model required a massive cultural shift within NASA. The agency had to explicitly and publicly “accept the risk that… there could be some failures.” This philosophy, often referred to as “shots on goal,” was a direct trade-off. By accepting a higher risk of individual mission failures, NASA believed it could get more missions, to more diverse locations on the Moon, more often, and for significantly less money per mission than the old, risk-averse model.

To make this work, the original intent of the CLPS model was for NASA to be a “hands-off” customer. Unlike a traditional mission with deep government engineering oversight at every step, CLPS vendors were meant to have the autonomy to design, build, and fly their hardware as they saw fit. NASA would just be the customer, waiting for its package to be delivered.

CLPS Successes and Failures: The Model in Practice

The “shots on goal” philosophy was tested almost immediately, providing a raw, unfiltered look at the model’s stark advantages and disadvantages.

The very first CLPS mission, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, launched in January 2024. It was a textbook example of the “accepted risk.” Hours after a successful launch, the spacecraft suffered a critical propulsion anomaly. It failed to reach the Moon and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere. NASA lost all its payloads, but its financial exposure was limited to the fixed value of the contract. The model, though painful, had worked as designed.

Just one month later, the other side of the model was proven. Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission successfully landed its Odysseus spacecraft on the Moon in February 2024. This was a historic moment: the first-ever commercial lunar landing and the first American spacecraft to soft-land on the Moon since the Apollo program. The landing was not perfect – a navigation sensor failed, and the lander tipped over on the surface – but it successfully transmitted data. It proved, unequivocally, that the commercial model could work.

The CLPS market itself has proven to be as volatile as the missions. The vendor pool has seen significant turnover. Masten Space Systems, one of the original providers awarded a task order, filed for bankruptcy in 2022, and its lunar mission was canceled. Another company, Orbit Beyond, was awarded a task order in 2019 but returned it just months later, citing an inability to meet the aggressive schedule.

This volatility demonstrates the extreme financial fragility of this emerging market. These companies are not just risking NASA’s payloads; they are risking their entire existence on these high-stakes missions. Despite the failures, the CLPS program has, as its proponents claim, “democratized” access to the Moon. In just a few years, it has funded the development of multiple new lunar lander designs and provided far more opportunities for the science community to fly instruments than the old model of one or two large, expensive missions per decade.

A Summary of CLPS Missions and Market Volatility

The CLPS initiative has been a high-stakes, high-turnover experiment. The roster of providers and the status of their missions provide a concrete, non-technical snapshot of the program’s outcomes. The following table summarizes the primary CLPS vendors, their lander systems, and the status of their initial missions, highlighting the mix of historic success, public failure, and extreme market volatility that has defined the program.

In 2024, the NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a critical audit of the CLPS program. This report is perhaps the single most important document for understanding the enormous challenges the new Commercial Mars Payload Services program will face. The findings were a stark warning.

The OIG found that, despite its successes, the CLPS program was suffering from systemic problems. The missions that were under contract had already experienced an average schedule delay of 14 months and had seen their total costs increase by $208.2 million.

The cause of these problems, the OIG concluded, was not just the inexperience of the vendors; it was NASA itself. The audit found that NASA had deviated from its own “hands-off” strategy. As the commercial companies ran into the inevitable technical and financial troubles of building a new lunar lander, NASA’s deeply ingrained, risk-averse engineering culture intervened. The agency began demanding more insight, more reviews, and more control over the vendors’ processes.

This “augmented insight” and other NASA-directed changes (such as moving a landing site) “negated” the core premise of the CLPS model. And it came at a high price: $171.4 million in project cost increases, which NASA, not the vendors, had to pay.

The OIG’s most critical finding was that the firm-fixed-price (FFP) contract model was “unsuitable” for this kind of work. FFP contracts are excellent for buying a known product or service, like an airline ticket or a cargo launch. They are, the OIG argued, a terrible tool for high-risk research and development, where the requirements are not well-defined and technical challenges are a certainty. The report also found that NASA’s initial schedules, which averaged 30 months from contract award to launch, were “overly optimistic.” The actual average had ballooned to 44 months, reflecting the true difficulty of the task.

Applicable Lessons for Mars

The tumultuous, expensive, and chaotic history of the CLPS program provides a set of direct, hard-won lessons that will be applied to the new Mars initiative. Two of these lessons stand out as existential threats to the CMPS program’s success.

The first is the unresolved cultural conflict within NASA. The OIG audit reveals a fundamental divide between the agency’s programmatic leadership, which wants to embrace a low-cost, high-risk commercial model, and its engineering culture, which is trained and tasked with mitigating all risk to ensure 100% mission success.

This conflict, which NASA failed to resolve even for the Moon, will be magnified exponentially at Mars. The Moon is a three-day trip with a 3-second round-trip light delay. Mars is a seven-to-nine-month journey with a 44-minute round-trip light delay. The lunar landing is a straightforward propulsion problem in a vacuum. The Mars landing is a famously complex, autonomous, “seven-minute” ballet of fire and parachutes.

If NASA’s engineering culture could not remain “hands-off” for a “simple” lunar lander, it is almost inconceivable that it will be able to resist intervening in a vastly more complex, expensive, and high-profile Mars mission. The moment a commercial vendor’s Mars lander runs into a technical snag, the internal pressure for NASA to add “augmented insight” will be immense. This cultural conflict is the single greatest threat to the CMPS model.

The second lesson is what could be called the “Mars market fallacy.” The CLPS model is built on the assumption that NASA will one day be just one of many customers in a thriving lunar economy, with private science, tourism, and resource-prospecting companies also buying rides. This assumption is plausible for the Moon.

It is not plausible for Mars, at least not in the near term. As industry workshops have concluded, the “economic incentives… are likely not the same as those for Lunar missions.” The consensus is that “NASA might likely be the only customer in the near-term.”

This means the “Mars economy” is, for now, a fantasy. The CMPS program is not “stimulating a market” in the same way. It is creating a specialized supplier. This changes the entire dynamic. The financial health of the CMPS providers will be 100% dependent on NASA’s budget and programmatic commitment. NASA cannot be just a customer; it must be a stable, long-term “anchor customer.” This makes the success of CMPS a matter of political will and sustained federal funding, not just a matter of market forces.

The Red Planet’s Gauntlet: Why Mars is Not the Moon

The central, unavoidable challenge for the Commercial Mars Payload Services program is a simple one: Mars is not the Moon. It is an exponentially more difficult target. Every system – navigation, communication, power, and landing – must be more robust, more autonomous, and more resilient. The lessons from the lunar CLPS program are a starting point, but they don’t begin to cover the unique set of problems that Mars presents.

The “Seven Minutes of Terror”: An Unsolvable Landing Problem

Landing on the Moon is difficult. Landing on Mars is a nightmare. The lunar environment, a predictable vacuum, makes a landing a pure physics problem of thrust versus gravity. A lander’s descent is a controlled, all-propulsive burn from orbit to the surface.

Mars, on the other hand, has an atmosphere, and it’s the worst possible kind of atmosphere for landing a spacecraft. This is the great atmospheric paradox of Mars. The atmosphere is thick enough to be dangerous, but far too thin to be helpful.

This paradox plays out in a violent, autonomous sequence that NASA engineers call the “Seven Minutes of Terror.”

1. Thick Enough to Burn: A spacecraft arriving from Earth hits the top of the thin Martian atmosphere at over 12,000 mph. The friction from this impact, even in such thin air, compresses it into a superheated plasma that can reach 1,600°C. This requires the spacecraft to be encased in a massive, heavy heat shield to prevent it from being incinerated.
2. Too Thin to Brake: After the heat shield has done its job and slowed the craft to supersonic speeds, the atmosphere is too thin for a parachute to finish the job. A large, supersonic parachute can only slow a one-ton lander to about 200 mph. This is not a landing speed; it’s a high-speed crash.

Because of this paradox, NASA had to invent the enormously complex “Sky Crane” system for its Curiosityand Perseverance rovers. After the parachute is jettisoned, a jet-powered backpack ignites its own rockets, slows its descent, flies to a safe landing spot, and then gently lowers the one-ton rover to the surface on a set of cables before flying off to crash a safe distance away.

This entire sequence, from atmospheric entry to touchdown, takes about seven minutes. And during that time, the spacecraft is completely on its own. Mars is so far from Earth that the one-way radio signal delay can be as long as 22 minutes. This means the round-trip signal time is 44 minutes. When a lander begins its seven-minute descent, it will have already been on the surface – either safely or in pieces – for at least 14 minutes before mission control on Earth gets the very first signal that the descent has started.

Real-time control is impossible. This entire landing sequence must be perfectly autonomous.

To date, no one has ever successfully landed anything heavier than the Perseverance rover (about 1,025 kg) on Mars. Human missions, by contrast, are expected to require landing payloads of 20 metric tons or more.

This presents a massive, perhaps insurmountable, challenge for the CMPS model. The 2024 NASA studies showed that several CLPS providers, like Firefly and Astrobotic, proposed to “adapt” or “modify” their lunar landers for Mars. This concept is a programmatic fiction. A lunar lander is an open-frame spacecraft designed for a vacuum. It has no heat shield, no aeroshell, and no parachute. A Mars lander is a complex, integrated system designed to fight an atmosphere.

One cannot be “adapted” to the other. These companies will need to build a completely new spacecraft from the ground up. This means NASA is not buying a “service” from an experienced vendor. It is funding the R&D for a brand-new, high-risk Mars lander. This again reinforces the OIG’s finding that a firm-fixed-price contract is the wrong tool for this kind of work. It also gives an enormous, perhaps unassailable, advantage to “heritage” providers like Lockheed Martin, which can propose to “adapt” their existing, flight-proven Mars lander (the InSight design) rather than invent one from scratch.

The Power Problem: Dust and Darkness

Surviving the landing is only the first challenge. Once on the surface, a spacecraft has to survive the relentless, hostile Martian environment. The primary challenge is power.

Mars is, on average, 1.5 times farther from the Sun than Earth. This means the intensity of the sunlight reaching the surface is, at best, only 45% of what a solar panel would receive on Earth or the Moon. To generate the same amount of power, a lander on Mars needs more than double the solar panel area.

This weak sunlight is combined with a day-night cycle that is almost 25 hours long, with roughly 13 hours of complete darkness. Any solar-powered lander must have a battery system large and robust enough to not only survive this long night but also the extreme cold.

The surface temperature on Mars can swing wildly from a pleasant 30°C (86°F) at the equator on a summer day to a devastating -140°C (-220°F) every single night. A large portion of any lander’s precious power budget is dedicated simply to “survival heaters” to keep its own electronics, batteries, and science instruments from freezing and cracking.

But the real killer on Mars is dust. The planet is covered in a fine, talc-like powder that is electrostatically charged, so it clings to everything. This dust is the “biggest threat” to robotic missions.

Mars is subject to regional and even global dust storms that can last for weeks or months. These storms attack solar-powered systems in a devastating, two-part assault. First, the dust suspended in the atmosphere “dims the sky,” blotting out the already-weak Sun and choking off the lander’s power supply. Second, when the storm passes, that dust settles out of the air and forms a thick, insulating coat on top of the solar panels, permanently reducing their efficiency.

This is exactly what killed NASA’s InSight lander. After years of successful operation, its massive solar panels became so coated in dust that it could no longer recharge its batteries. In December 2022, it fell silent. The earlier Spirit and Opportunity rovers were only saved by a series of “cleaning events” – lucky wind gusts and dust devils that happened to blow their panels clean. Relying on lucky weather is not a viable, long-term engineering strategy. Any CMPS lander must have a way to mitigate or remove this dust, or it will face a short and finite lifespan.

The Communication Gulf: Autonomy is Not Optional

Finally, there is the simple, crushing challenge of distance. The vast gulf between Earth and Mars makes communication a non-real-time, asynchronous problem.

As noted, the light-time delay of up to 22 minutes one-way makes real-time control impossible. Mission controllers on Earth cannot “joystick” a rover around a rock or command a robotic arm in real time. They must upload an entire day’s worth of commands (e.g., “drive 10 meters, stop, point camera, take a picture, drill this rock”) and then wait hours, or even until the next day, to get the results. This requires every system on Mars to have a high degree of on-board autonomy.

This communication gulf is made absolute by an event called the “solar conjunction.” For about two to three weeks, every 26 months, Mars passes directly behind the Sun from Earth’s perspective. The Sun, a massive and noisy star, blasts out so much radio interference during this period that it makes communication completely impossible. All missions on or around Mars are put into a “safe mode” – they stop working, stop driving, and just wait. This is a massive operational inefficiency that a permanent, human-tended infrastructure must solve.

The problem is also more immediate. The surface rovers don’t talk to Earth directly. They use a powerful UHF radio to send their data to a Mars orbiter flying overhead, which then uses its large, “high-gain” antenna to relay the data to Earth. This relay network is the true, unsung backbone of all Mars exploration.

But that network is ancient. It relies on orbiters like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and MAVEN, which are all operating long past their original design lives. When these aging orbiters fail, the data stream from the Martian surface will be severed.

Building the Mars Infrastructure

The Commercial Mars Payload Services program isn’t just about landing individual, isolated science payloads. It’s about a systematic, long-term campaign to build a permanent, commercially-operated infrastructure at Mars. This infrastructure will form the logistical backbone for all future missions, both robotic and human. The effort is focused on two key areas: building a new communications network and delivering the precursor payloads needed for human arrival.

A New Relay Network

The most urgent task for the CMPS program is to establish a modern, reliable data relay network. The $80 million in NASA’s FY26 budget request for a “Mars communications relay capability” is the seed money for this new market. This is the first, critical piece of infrastructure. NASA wants to stop building and operating its own relay orbiters and, instead, buy data-relay services from commercial providers.

This has already kicked off a “commercial race to Mars,” with several companies designing orbiters to meet this new demand. The 2024 NASA concept studies identified a field of key contenders.

• Blue Origin has proposed a concept based on its “Blue Ring” spacecraft, a versatile orbital-transfer vehicle (“space tug”) that can be adapted for deep-space missions.
• Rocket Lab has also stated its interest, leveraging the experience it gained from building the twin spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE Mars mission.
• Lockheed Martin is a natural contender, as it is the “heritage” provider that built and currently operates NASA’s entire fleet of aging Mars orbiters.
• SpaceX was also selected for a 2024 study to investigate adapting its Earth-orbit (Starlink) communication satellites for Mars. A “Starlink” network at Mars would be revolutionary, providing continuous, high-bandwidth coverage that could finally solve the solar conjunction problem by relaying signals around the Sun, rather than being blocked by it.

These new orbiters will use modern, high-speed optical (laser) communications, a technology NASA has already demonstrated, which can transmit data at much higher rates than traditional radio. This network is the essential first step; without it, all other surface missions are flying blind.

Delivering Precursor Science

Once the communications network is in place, CMPS will begin its primary work: delivering a steady cadence of scientific and technical payloads to the surface. These precursor missions will be guided by the goals of NASA’s Mars Future Plan.

That plan outlines three main goals for these missions.

1. Explore the Potential for Martian Life: This involves sending instruments to search for biosignatures, understand past habitable environments, and, most importantly, access the subsurface to look for and characterize deposits of water ice.
2. Discover “Dynamic Mars”: This involves studying Mars as an active planet, understanding its current climate and geology, and studying its “dynamic modern environments.”
3. Support Human Exploration: This is the key goal for the ESDMD. Payloads will be designed to “prepare for the science that humans will do once there.” This includes advanced meteorological stations, subsurface drills, and seismometers to characterize landing sites for their stability and resource potential.

Testing Technologies for Humans: The ISRU Revolution

The most important “tech demos” that CMPS landers will deliver are those related to In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU).

ISRU is the concept of “living off the land.” For a long-term human Mars mission, it is not an optional extra; it is the only way the mission is logistically and financially feasible.

The Perseverance rover carried the first-ever ISRU experiment, a toaster-sized device called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment). MOXIE was a stunning success. It proved that it could pull in the thin, carbon-dioxide-rich Martian atmosphere and use a process called solid oxide electrolysis to split the CO2 molecules, producing small amounts of pure, breathable oxygen.

MOXIE was just a small-scale proof of concept. A human mission needs to scale this technology up by a factor of hundreds or thousands.

This is where CMPS comes in. The CMPS landers will be the “work trucks” that deliver the next generation: large-scale, operational ISRU plants. These systems will test the ability to produce oxygen and water not just in grams, but in tons.

The ultimate goal of ISRU is to manufacture rocket propellant for the return trip. By combining hydrogen (which could be brought from Earth or, ideally, sourced from Martian water ice) with the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, an ISRU plant can create methane (CH4) and liquid oxygen (LOX) – a high-performance, storable rocket fuel.

The ability to manufacture propellant on Mars is what makes a human return possible. The mass of a Mars Ascent Vehicle plus all the fuel it needs for the return journey to Earth is so enormous that launching it all from Earth is a logistical impossibility. The entire Moon to Mars architecture is based on the assumption that astronauts will create their own return propellant after they arrive. The CMPS program will be the one to prove this technology works before NASA bets human lives on it.

A New Mars Marketplace

The success of the Commercial Mars Payload Services program rests entirely on the existence of a competitive and capable commercial market. A decade ago, this would have been a fantasy. Today, a new generation of aerospace companies, fueled by private investment and new technologies, is making this market a reality.

In May 2024, NASA’s Mars Exploration Program initiated this market by awarding 12 concept studies to nine U.S. companies. These studies, funded at $200,000 to $300,000 each, asked industry to provide detailed reports on how they would provide commercial Mars services. This list of awardees provides the first tangible map of the new Mars marketplace, which is already segmenting into different service categories and technological approaches.

The Heavy-Lift Game Changers

This group includes companies building new, fully reusable, heavy-lift rockets that have the potential to fundamentally change the economics of accessing space, making a Mars campaign affordable.

• SpaceX: The most disruptive player in the market is SpaceX. Its Starship vehicle is not just a rocket; it was designed from the ground up to be a fully reusable, interplanetary transport system for Mars. Starship is designed to launch 100-150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, refuel in orbit, and then fly to Mars and perform a propulsive landing. Its heat shield is designed to handle the high-speed entry into the Martian atmosphere.The capability of Starship is so far beyond any other system that it creates an entirely new class of mission. A single landing could deliver over 100 metric tons of payload to the Martian surface. The Perseverance rover, for context, weighed one ton. A single Starship could deploy an “army of rovers,” an entire ISRU plant, or a human habitat in one flight. SpaceX is not waiting for NASA; it is already offering Starship for commercial Mars payloads and signed its first customer, the Italian Space Agency, in 2025.
• Blue Origin: The other major player in heavy lift is Blue Origin. Its New Glenn rocket is a reusable, high-capacity launcher designed to compete with Starship. Blue Origin is already on contract with NASA to launch the ESCAPADE Mars mission, demonstrating the company’s deep-space ambitions and the rocket’s capability. Its “Blue Ring” platform, which was proposed for both the relay and large payload studies, is a flexible “space tug” designed to move large payloads from Earth orbit to deep-space destinations.

The Heritage Providers

This group consists of the traditional aerospace giants who have been NASA’s primary, most trusted contractors for decades. Their competitive advantage isn’t disruptive new hardware; it’s an unparalleled, decades-long record of mission success.

• Lockheed Martin: No company has more experience at Mars than Lockheed Martin. The company has supported all 22 of NASA’s missions to the Red Planet and built 11 of the spacecraft. This includes orbiters like MRO and MAVEN, and nearly every successful NASA lander, from Viking in the 1970s to Phoenix and InSight.Lockheed’s strategy is to leverage this unmatched flight heritage. They are not proposing a brand-new, high-risk design. As seen in their other proposals, they are offering a “commercial” version of a spacecraft that has already successfully landed on Mars (the InSight lander). This is a powerful sales pitch that directly counters the high-risk “new space” approach and appeals to NASA’s risk-averse engineering culture.
• United Launch Services (ULA): As a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, ULA brings a similar focus on reliability. Its proposal to modify its Vulcan rocket’s upper stage into a “space tug” leverages decades of experience in cryogenic fluid management and precision interplanetary navigation.

The Lunar Veterans

This group includes the new-space companies that cut their teeth on the CLPS program. Their pitch is that they have already been through the fire of developing a commercial deep-space lander.

• Astrobotic and Firefly Aerospace: Companies like Astrobotic and Firefly are proposing to “scale up” their lunar lander designs (Blue Ghost and the Griffin lineage) for Mars. As established, this is an enormous technical leap. But these companies have built the programmatic muscle – the teams, the software, and the supply chains – for rapid, fixed-price development. They are betting that this agility, which they proved in the CLPS program, will allow them to solve the Mars EDL problem faster and cheaper than the heritage providers.

The Commercial Path to Mars Sample Return

One of the most immediate, high-stakes, and significant applications for the new Commercial Mars Payload Services program will be to support NASA’s struggling, flagship-class Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign.

MSR is a joint NASA/ESA campaign to retrieve the scientifically-selected sample tubes cached by the Perseverance rover and return them to Earth. It is the highest-priority science mission of the decade. But its immense complexity has caused its budget and schedule to spiral out of control, with internal estimates projecting a total cost of over $11 billion.

This budget crisis has created a perfect opening for the new commercial paradigm. In 2024, facing a financial and political breaking point, NASA announced it was soliciting new, “outside-the-box” ideas from industry on how to accomplish MSR faster and cheaper.

The commercial sector, sensing this opportunity, has responded. Lockheed Martin, the heritage provider, has put forth a detailed, public proposal for a commercial MSR mission. Their pitch is a direct response to the MSR crisis: they are offering to execute the most complex part of the mission – the Sample Retrieval Lander – on a firm-fixed-price contract.

This “heritage-based” proposal is built around their flight-proven InSight Mars lander design. They claim this solution is “drastically” lighter and simpler than the original government-led design. Other agile companies, like Rocket Lab, have also proposed their own low-cost, end-to-end MSR architectures.

This chain of events is not a coincidence. The MSR program is in a budget crisis at the exact same moment the CMPS program is being formally created. CMPS is being positioned as a programmatic “off-ramp” for the failing MSR mission.

The traditional “cost-plus” flagship model has failed to deliver MSR on budget. By awarding a “commercial” CMPS-style contract for the MSR lander, NASA can:

1. Cap its financial liability. A fixed-price contract, while risky for the vendor, would protect NASA from the uncontrolled cost overruns that have plagued MSR.
2. Shift the technical risk. A fixed-price model would shift the immense technical and schedule risk for developing the lander from NASA to the contractor.
3. Perform a public, face-saving pivot. It would allow NASA to justify a major, necessary reset of the MSR program, framing it as an embrace of “commercial innovation” that is saving the mission.

The first, most high-profile CMPS contract might not be a small science lander at all. It might be a high-stakes, “winner-take-all” competition between heritage giants like Lockheed Martin and new-space players to see who can provide the commercial solution to save NASA’s most important mission.

Summary

The Commercial Mars Payload Services program represents a fundamental change in NASA’s approach to planetary exploration. It signals the agency’s firm commitment to a future built on public-private partnerships, extending a strategy that has already transformed low-Earth orbit to the most challenging and distant destination in the solar system.

CMPS is a direct descendant of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. From its predecessor, it inherits both a “shots on goal” philosophy of accepting risk to achieve a higher cadence, and a series of painful, hard-won lessons on contracting, scheduling, and the deep-seated cultural challenges within NASA itself. The 2024 OIG critique of the CLPS program serves as a stark warning: the agency’s greatest challenge may be its own inability to let go and truly accept the “hands-off” risk that a commercial model demands.

This challenge will be magnified by the Red Planet. Mars is not the Moon. The technical hurdles are immense, from the “seven minutes of terror” during landing – an atmospheric problem with no simple, proven solution for heavy payloads – to the relentless assault of dust and cold on the surface that has killed past missions, and the vast communication gulf that makes autonomy a prerequisite for survival.

To overcome these challenges, NASA is turning to a newly vibrant and diverse commercial market. It is leveraging the massive, game-changing capabilities of heavy-lift rockets like Starship, the unparalleled flight heritage of providers like Lockheed Martin, and the agile, fast-moving mindset of the new-space veterans from the CLPS program.

The initial goal of CMPS is to build a commercial infrastructure at Mars, starting with a modern communications relay network and following with a steady cadence of robotic landers. These missions will deliver precursor science and, most importantly, demonstrate the critical technologies, like ISRU, that are necessary to prepare for the first human explorers. In the process, CMPS is also being positioned as a potential commercial lifeline for the agency’s troubled, high-priority Mars Sample Return campaign.

This is NASA’s new Mars strategy: to stop being the sole builder of every bridge to a new world and, instead, become the anchor customer for a thriving, and eventually self-sustaining, interplanetary economy. CMPS is the first, high-risk, high-stakes step in building that economy.