Overview
- NASA announced at the Kennedy Space Center MAX POWER event that it has formally booked the PROMISE rover to fly on Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 with a targeted late‑2028 lunar south‑pole arrival and an 18‑month primary mission, and it awarded Blue Origin a $94 million base delivery contract with a $140 million performance option.
- JPL will build PROMISE from spare flight components and engineering testbeds from the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers and will use a flight‑spare radioisotope thermoelectric generator to operate through darkness and probe permanently shadowed regions with a one‑meter drill and spectrometers.
- NASA restructured its Commercial Lunar Payload Services into CLPS 2.0, named eight eligible providers including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, and set a combined contract ceiling of up to $10 billion over 10 years while raising the near‑term CLPS ceiling to $4.2 billion.
- The agency issued roughly $1.3 billion in Venture‑Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) task orders for transport work, awarded miniCAST component contracts for surface power and wireless charging to Honeybee, Redwire and Yank, and selected SpaceX for a Starship Starlink communications demonstration in 2028.
- Key near‑term risks remain because the campaign depends on unproven landers and launch systems such as Blue Moon, New Glenn and Starship, plus successful integration of transport, comms and power demos, and NASA estimates PROMISE’s total cost will be below $400 million including delivery.