NASA Awards Lunar Rover Contracts, Sets Moon Base Campaign Launches Starting Fall 2026

NASA on Tuesday awarded two new lunar rover contracts, gave Blue Origin a separate task order to deliver those vehicles to the moon’s south polar region, and set launch windows for the first three missions in its newly named “Moon Base” campaign beginning as early as fall 2026.

The update, announced at a Moon Base event at NASA Headquarters in Washington and detailed in a May 26 release, marks a step beyond one-off lunar payload flights. NASA said it awarded Astrolab $219 million and Lunar Outpost $220 million to build and deliver the first phase of Lunar Terrain Vehicles, or LTVs, under Phase 1 High Achievability Mission task orders. The agency separately awarded Blue Origin $188 million under two task orders to deliver the rovers to the moon’s South Pole region, with an option period worth $280.4 million. NASA said the rover awards are milestone-based task orders designed to enable deployment of crewed and uncrewed mobility systems to the lunar surface by 2028.

The broader significance is that NASA is now using its commercial moon-delivery model to assemble a coordinated surface campaign near the lunar south pole, not just fly isolated science payloads. The agency is pairing cargo landers, rovers and scouting missions into what it calls a Moon Base architecture meant to gather data and reduce risk ahead of later Artemis surface operations. NASA has said these are the first of more than a dozen missions it expects to announce in 2026.

Over the next 18 months, NASA said, Astrolab and Lunar Outpost will finalize rover designs, conduct crewed evaluations and qualify flight units for operational readiness. The vehicles are intended to support future astronaut and robotic operations in the region.

The first named mission, Moon Base I, is targeted for launch no earlier than fall 2026 aboard Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance lander. NASA said it will head to Shackleton Connecting Ridge carrying payloads that include the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies and a Laser Retroreflective Array.

Moon Base II is planned for later in 2026 and is slated to deliver more than 1,100 pounds of cargo on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, according to NASA. The cargo will include Astrolab’s FLIP rover.

Moon Base III, also targeted for 2026, will carry the Lunar Vertex investigation on Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C Trinity lander, NASA said. The agency said the flight will also include payloads from the European Space Agency and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute.

NASA also provided an update on MoonFall, a later mission led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Under that plan, four drones will make short hops across the lunar surface to survey potential Artemis landing sites, with Firefly Aerospace set to build the spacecraft carrying them and launch targeted for 2028.

If carried out on the timeline NASA laid out Tuesday, the sequence would begin to put commercial mobility systems, cargo deliveries and site-survey tools into the same south-pole campaign before astronauts return to work on the surface there. “The Moon Base will be America’s and humanity’s first outpost on another celestial world,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in the agency’s release.

The effort builds on Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, a NASA initiative launched in 2018 to buy lunar delivery services from private companies rather than build every lander in-house. NASA said it released the final request for proposals for CLPS 2.0 on May 15, with responses due June 30, as it expands the commercial pipeline behind those missions.