Lunar orbiter among upcoming NASA CLPS task orders
NASA plans to award three more lunar missions this year through a commercial services program, including an orbiter that would replace the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
In earnings calls this week, executives with Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines, the two companies that have landed spacecraft on the moon through NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program, said they expect NASA to award three more task orders through that program by the end of the year.
Two of the upcoming CLPS task orders will be lander missions, which have accounted for nearly all the missions under the program since the agency issued the first task orders in 2019. The companies did not discuss specifics of those missions.
The third, though, would be an "orbiter imaging service," said Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly Aerospace, during his company's Aug. 12 earnings call. Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, mentioned in an Aug. 14 earnings call a task order expected later this summer or in early fall for "the orbiter surveyor to map the moon in replacement of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter."
NASA developed LRO two decades ago during an earlier effort to return humans to the moon, the Vision for Space Exploration. Launched in 2009, LRO features a high-resolution camera and other instruments for studying the moon. The spacecraft continues to function well and operates under an extended mission running through 2028.
The spacecraft is aging, though, and scientists have for years pushed to fly a replacement to continue lunar science and support future lander missions. "Plans for a next-generation long-lived integrated orbiter with modern instruments that can replace the highly productive LRO (launched in 2009) are long overdue," a 2022 report by the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group noted.
NASA has not disclosed plans to develop a successor to LRO, either through the CLPS program or other approaches. The agency provides few details about upcoming CLPS task orders or those being competed, and once it awards a task order, it does not release a source selection statement. A timeline of CLPS missions on the NASA website does not include several recent awards and lacks updated dates for others.
Both companies are well-positioned to pursue a lunar orbiter imaging mission. Firefly announced in 2025 its intent to develop a commercial lunar imaging service, called Ocula, using cameras mounted on the company's Elytra spacecraft that will accompany future Blue Ghost lander missions. Intuitive Machines has a NASA contract to manage the operations of the high-resolution camera on LRO, as well as another NASA-developed camera, ShadowCam, on South Korea's Danuri lunar orbiter.
The companies also have backlogs of four CLPS lander missions each. That includes missions awarded in June through a CLPS task order called CS-8 that also included two landers for a third company, Astrobotic (now Voyager Lunar Systems). The four landers awarded under the task order will carry an identical suite of instruments.
Both companies said the CS-8 task order is intended to demonstrate the ability to rapidly produce a standardized lander model.
"The primary goal of this mission is to demonstrate repeatable access to the lunar surface on an accelerated timeline, executing the mission in half the time of our first landing," Kim said. "NASA's contract represents a near build-to-print lander design to enable faster production cycles and template our successful Blue Ghost into a production line vehicle."
"The whole idea here is no longer building bespoke landers for each individual mission, but how do you get the production rate up," Altemus said, noting the company's proposal for the CS-8 task order included a 26-month schedule to build the lander.
Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines have been expanding production facilities for their landers. Altemus said his company has added 75,000 square feet of production space at its Houston headquarters that will be used to build both landers and its constellation of five lunar data relay satellites.
Kim said Firefly has more than quadrupled cleanroom space for lander and spacecraft production. "That gives us a really good position and extra capacity to take on more, so we see the CS-8 win in the second quarter as just the beginning."
Altemus said he expects a final task order under the original CLPS contract, called CP-32, to be awarded early next year. NASA will then shift to a new contract, CLPS 2.0, with proposals due to NASA at the end of June.
Both companies said they are bidding on the contract, which will have a maximum value of $10 billion over 10 years, with an option for a five-year extension that would increase the maximum value by $5 billion.
Both are preparing to offer larger landers as part of CLPS 2.0. While most of Intuitive Machines' missions have used its Nova-C lander, with a payload capacity of about 100 kilograms, the company won a task order in March for a mission designated IM-6 using its larger Nova-D lander, which can deliver about 500 kilograms.
Altemus said the company is considering building a second Nova-D lander in parallel with the lander for IM-6 without a contract yet for it. "We're looking at building two in a row, or two in parallel is a better way to put it, in our facilities here, anticipating an award for a second Nova-D in the same time frame, which is 2029."
The companies are looking at even larger landers to support NASA's anticipated needs for its lunar base. Altemus said the company was looking at a revised three-engine configuration for Nova-D that would allow it to deliver up to 1 metric ton to the surface.
"NASA is calling for landers that can carry two to five metric tons to the surface," he said, which would require upgrades to the engine. "That's what we're doing in coming up with that roadmap of where those technologies need to be matured to get to the heavier and heavier cargo, which will be an essential piece of CLPS 2.0."
Kim said Firefly also has plans to increase the performance of its Blue Ghost landers.
"We're really excited about taking our success from Blue Ghost Mission 1 and subsequent missions and applying it and extending it to a larger lander to take even more mass, even more volume, to the moon, so that we can be part of the infrastructure builds of the moon base."
He said details of the company's larger landers remain confidential, but he described a "modular" approach that can be scaled up to payloads weighing several metric tons.
"We have a design that takes a lot of the common components that we successfully landed on the moon with, but scales it in terms of size, volume and mass so we can take that moon base infrastructure cargo reliably," he said. "We're talking a multi-ton capability."
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