NASA selects Intuitive Machines for south pole lunar lander mission

WASHINGTON — NASA has selected Intuitive Machines to deliver a set of payloads to the south polar region of the moon in 2027, the first award under a commercial lunar lander program in nearly a year and a half.

NASA announced Aug. 29 that it awarded a task order valued at $116.9 million through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to Intuitive Machines. That company’s Nova-C lander will deliver six payloads, with a combined mass of 79 kilograms, to the south polar region of the moon in 2027.

The six payloads — four from NASA centers, one from the European Space Agency and one from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics — include biology, planetary science and space science experiments, as well as a laser retroreflector array. The ESA payload, the Package for Resource Observation and In-Situ Prospecting for Exploration, Characterization, and Testing (PROSPECT), will drill a meter below the surface to study any volatiles like water ice that may exist below the surface.

“The instruments on this newly awarded flight will help us achieve multiple scientific objectives and strengthen our understanding of the Moon’s environment,” Chris Culbert, CLPS program manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said in a statement.

In its own statement, Intuitive Machines said that mass on the lander “is expected to be available” for commercial payloads in addition to the NASA payloads, but did not announce any customers beyond NASA.

The award is the fourth that Intuitive Machines has received, more than any other company that is part of the CLPS contract. Astrobotic and Firefly Aerospace have each won two task orders and Draper has one. Intuitive Machines is the only company to have landed on the moon when its lander Odysseus touched down, albeit off-kilter, on the IM-1 mission in February.

The award, formally known as task order CP-22, was the first landing mission selected by NASA under the CLPS program since March 2023, when it gave a task order to Firefly Aerospace for a landing on the lunar farside. NASA had pushed back the award of CP-22 as well as another mission, CP-21, to go to a region of the moon called the Gruithuisen Domes.

Speaking at the AIAA ASCEND conference Aug. 1, Culbert said the award of CP-22 was imminent, to be followed by CP-21 by the end of the year.

“We’ve had a fairly significant delay since our last task order. Part of that is because we learned some lessons on these first two missions,” he said then, referring to IM-1 and Astrobotic’s unsuccessful Peregrine lander. “We wanted to take that into account and make some changes to the most current task order.”

He didn’t elaborate on the changes, but said then that NASA intended to maintain a cadence of two CLPS task orders a year, with CP-21 and CP-22 this year and two more to be awarded in 2025.

“By supporting a robust cadence of CLPS flights to a variety of locations on the lunar surface, including two flights currently planned by companies for later this year, NASA will explore more of the moon than ever before,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, in the agency statement.

The two coming up later this year are Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission and Firefly’s Blue Ghost 1. Firefly announced Aug. 26 that Blue Ghost had arrived at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for environmental testing ahead of a launch in the fourth quarter of this year. Intuitive Machines executives said on an Aug. 13 earnings call that the company was targeting December or early January for the launch of IM-2.