By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, June 30 (Reuters) - NASA on Tuesday awarded $590 million worth of contracts to Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines for more uncrewed lunar lander missions in late 2028 as the agency seeks to ramp up commercial moon activities under its Artemis program.
Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based moon lander company in the process of being acquired by Voyager Technologies, won a $297.9 million contract to deliver two landers. Firefly won a $144.2 million contract for
a single lander mission and Intuitive Machines was awarded $148.3 million, also for a single lander mission.
The contracts are part of a "phase one" effort by NASA chief Jared Isaacman to quickly send more robotic missions to the lunar surface as the agency races with China to establish a long-term presence on the moon involving more difficult endeavors, such as landing humans there and building a moon base.
"Phase one, getting reliably to the surface — this is core part of that," NASA's moon base chief Carlos García-Galán said on Tuesday during a talk with Isaacman hosted by the space agency.
"We need to test many times in different places to be able to say that we’ve got that down, because we’re going to be putting very high-value assets on those landers," García-Galán said.
NASA and other customers will buy space on the landers for various scientific instruments, sensors and experiments aimed at studying the lunar surface.
Isaacman, who has shaken up NASA's Artemis architecture since taking office in December, envisions a flurry of robotic and crewed lunar missions that will help the U.S. private sector build up experience landing things on the moon before establishing a permanent human presence.
All three companies have attempted uncrewed moon landings since 2024, with only Firefly's Blue Ghost lander successfully touching down intact and upright on the surface in March 2025 - the first private company to achieve such a feat.
Astrobotic's Peregrine mission failed in Earth orbit shortly after launch in January 2024. Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander made it to the surface the following month but tipped over, followed by another attempt in 2025 in which the lander again tipped over, scuttling the science objectives for most of its onboard payloads.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Jamie Freed)
