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The market for sending spacecraft to the moon would seem to be a competitive one. NASA continues to drive the most demand for commercial lunar landers through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, with as much as $2.6 billion in contracts over 10 years. Every lunar lander mission by an American company launched to date had CLPS as the primary, if not only, customer.
NASA is ordering an average of two CLPS missions per year, but more than a dozen companies are eligible to bid on them. While many of those companies don’t appear to be actively competing for contracts, the demand for those missions from the rest of the field is leading to fierce competition.
But this spring, three lunar landers were headed to the moon, and what became apparent was the companies most deeply involved in CLPS — Astrobotic Technology, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines — are finding ways to work together. That cooperation is at one level tactical, ensuring that their missions don’t conflict with each other. At another level, their cooperation is more strategic, offering a united front in efforts to expand the CLPS program as it approaches a key inflection point: the end of the current CLPS contract, just as companies are finally making it to the surface of the moon and seeing new demand for their landers.
Coffee, doughnuts and frequency coordination
Earlier this year, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lander and Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 missions, both flying CLPS payloads, headed to the moon at the same time as Resilience, a lander from Japanese company ispace that is not part of CLPS.
“All of a sudden here a month ago, we had three lunar landers on their way to the moon,” said Tim Crain, senior vice president and chief growth officer of Intuitive Machines, during a panel at the 40th Space Symposium April 10.
Collaboration among the CLPS providers is driven by practical issues, particularly as companies fly simultaneous missions.
Crain said the companies set up communications among their mission directors, discussing issues such as radio-frequency interference. He pointed to coordination between Firefly and Intuitive as IM-2 orbited above the Blue Ghost 1 landing site ahead of its own landing, checking for inconsistencies. “We had great communication.”
Such coordination will be essential, he added, as more companies fly more missions in the next several years. “We’re going to have to communicate because we’re going to have three or four landers and orbiters operating at the same time,” he said. “Space traffic management, clear lines of communications and support for each other in spacecraft emergencies are going to be key.”
Other members of the panel on lunar “competimates” — the portmanteau of “competitor” and “teammate” — agreed on the importance of such coordination, adding that it should be done among the companies rather than be managed or overseen by NASA.
“There definitely has to be collaboration between us as vendors,” said Ray Allensworth, director of the Blue Ghost program at Firefly.
To date, that collaboration extended to working together to deal with shared challenges of the CLPS program like access to spectrum.
“NASA is still growing alongside us in trying to figure out what is the best way and most efficient way to give these licenses and coordinate all these different spacecraft,” she said. “It’s a very new thing for NASA to work these kinds of licenses with commercial companies.”
That collaboration should remain “organic,” said Dan Hendrickson, director of business development at Astrobotic. “We don’t necessarily want to have a whole lot of new regulatory structures to solve problems.”
“We’re in a learning period,” he argued. “We want to take it step by step, have company-to-company coordination as much as possible, and try to solve those problems together as a commercial community.”
NASA has, for now, shown no sign of wanting to get involved in those efforts by companies to coordinate lunar activities. “It is heartwarming that what we have actually created is a sustainable lunar community,” said Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, at a March 6 briefing after the IM-2 landing.
Companies, she noted, shared data from their missions with one another, among other practical contributions.
“Some people sent coffee, some people sent doughnuts for these events, just to show this community that we have with the providers,” she said. “We all share in each other’s successes and we all empathize with each other’s challenges.”
“We compete fiercely on the task orders” for CLPS, Crain said. “But when we get close to launch, there are phone calls going from CEO to CEO, from director of engineering to director of engineering, saying, ‘Hey, I know you guys have a mission coming up. If you need any help, let us know.’ The success of the program is important to all of our companies.”
Preparing for CLPS 2.0
These lunar businesses have a longer-term goal: preserving, and potentially expanding, the CLPS program. The contracts NASA awarded in 2018 to those companies and others expire in 2028, and both the agency and the companies have started to think about what a second round of contracts would look like.
That was a key theme of an April 1 hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee on the CLPS program, as the leaders of Astrobotic, Firefly and Intuitive all made similar cases for what they call “CLPS 2.0”.
“Now is an excellent time to consider what a CLPS 2.0 initiative should look like,” said John Thornton, chief executive of Astrobotic. He advocated for block buys, with NASA buying multiple lander missions at once rather than the current approach of buying one mission at a time. That approach would give companies greater assurances of long-term revenue and offer economies of scale not possible with one-off awards. “This will enable U.S. lander providers to buy in bulk from their U.S. supply chains and save CLPS money.”
Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly, also endorsed that approach as well as a steady stream of missions. He called for “stable, multi-year funding commitments for CLPS to maintain two to three annual missions to the moon,” as well as support for the supply chain used by CLPS companies and access to testing facilities.
And Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive, said that CLPS should be expanded beyond NASA. “While NASA-driven lunar exploration through CLPS and Artemis has advanced commercial capabilities, its full potential across broader government objectives remains underutilized,” he argued. “Expanding contracts to serve multiple agencies, such as national security and intelligence, could maximize efficiency, reduce cost and enhance innovation.”
He gave as one example a separate contract outside of CLPS that Intuitive won in 2024 to provide data relay services at the moon with a constellation of five satellites the company plans to deploy. “These lunar satellites could collect valuable information for national security, not just communications for Artemis,” he said, but didn’t elaborate on what information they could provide.
In his written testimony, Altemus endorsed stable funding and block buys, as well as support for larger landers. He also suggested that NASA winnow the current set of 14 companies that are part of CLPS, noting that beyond the three testifying at that hearing, only Draper has an active CLPS award. (OrbitBeyond won one of the first CLPS task orders in 2019 only to return it months later, while Masten Space Systems won a CLPS task order in 2020 but went bankrupt in 2022.)
“Companies that fail to secure tasks either must become competitive or be removed altogether,” he wrote. “The U.S. should reward success and focus on expanding lunar industrialization to overcome China’s increasingly capable lunar surface program.”
Visions beyond CLPS
Intuitive Machines and others in CLPS may be getting more competition. At the Space Symposium April 8, ispace U.S., the American subsidiary of ispace currently working with Draper on its CLPS mission, announced a partnership with Redwire on future lunar landers. Redwire is part of CLPS through its 2020 acquisition of Deep Space Systems, one of the nine original CLPS companies, although it has not aggressively pursued CLPS task orders.
CLPS will be an initial focus of that partnership, combining ispace’s lunar landers with Redwire technologies and testing facilities. Those firms are looking forward to expansion of CLPS as well as greater support for commercial applications of those landers beyond NASA’s own needs.
“Procurement is policy, and NASA needs to be very intentional as they proceed with their procurements and what they reward and what they don’t reward in order to encourage rather than discourage these sorts of commercial activities,” said Mike Gold, president of civil and international space at Redwire.
“We share a vision of the cislunar economy being able to put infrastructure on the moon,” said Ron Garan, chairman of ispace U.S. “We have visions that go beyond CLPS to spark that commercial market.”
old noted the emergence of companies interested in commercial landers for new markets, such as extracting helium-3. “That is an important inflection point we’re seeing in the industry,” he said. “I don’t know if helium-3 will work or not, but I know we’re seeing new customers that didn’t exist a few years ago.”
Others in the CLPS program expect companies competing for lunar lander task orders today will differentiate themselves in the years to come, should that demand from companies and government agencies materialize.
“Eventually, I think we’re all going to be diversifying and focusing on different aspects of the lunar economy,” said Astrobotic’s Hendrickson, who emphasized his company’s LunaGrid project to develop lunar surface power systems. “I can imagine a point in the future where our LunaGrid program provides power to our competimates.”
“The idea that, as companies, we will be doing the same thing over and over again, and replicating capabilities,” he argued, “would be a failure at the end of the day.”
This article first appeared in the May 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine.
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