NASA Announces Four New Lunar Lander Missions for 2028

NASA has awarded contracts to three aerospace companies for four lunar landers to launch in 2028.

On June 30th, NASA announced additional details about its new plans for the Moon.

The agency announced new contracts at a press conference, delivered as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program: Two awards go to Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic and one award each to Texas-based companies Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines. The contracts, which total $590.4 million, aim to put four landers on the Moon by late 2028.

All of the landers targeting 2028 launch will carry identical instrumentation to study the radiation environment on the way to the Moon and stereo cameras to document the plume of regolith raised up during landing. They will also carry a Laser Retroflector Array for lunar rangefinding. The landers may carry other payloads as well, but those haven't been decided yet.

Isaacman and others also gave updates on several missions that were already part of the CLPS program and are still on track, albeit rebranded as Moon Base missions. Those missions include the following:

All of these spacecraft will carry experiments to the lunar surface, though some are better characterized as technology demonstrators than scientific missions.

As part of the June 30th announcement, Isaacman also mentioned the possibility of retrofitting the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's full-scale engineering model of the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, formerly named Optimism. The agency says this rover — which they're renaming Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping and In-Situ Exploration (Promise) — might now head to the Moon. If that happens, Isaacman said it would be outfitted with new instruments.

In total, NASA is planning to send 17 landers to the Moon over just a few years. These missions, now part of the Moon Base program, are intended as preparation for crewed Artemis missions, and will ultimately provide a transition from brief expeditions to a permanent settlement. The agency planning for a sprawling Moon Base on the lunar surface by 2030.

“This is drawing on the playbook that worked very well for NASA in the 1960s,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman during the press conference. “We didn’t just jump to Apollo 11.”

The Artemis Initiative features a phased approach: Multiple launches, the most recent being the successful Artemis 2 mission to the Moon and back, are leading up to human bootprints on the lunar surface. The Moon Base missions surrounding the crewed missions of Artemis likewise feature a phased approach, first deploying technol