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takyon writes:

NASA selects nine companies for commercial lunar lander program

NASA has picked nine companies, ranging from startups to aerospace giants, to be eligible for future contracts to deliver payloads to the surface of the moon, but with no guarantee of business for any of them. NASA announced Nov. 29 the selections as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, where the agency will buy space on future commercial lunar landers to carry science instruments and other payloads. The winning companies are:

• Astrobotic Technology, Inc.: Pittsburgh[, Pennsylvania]
• Deep Space Systems: Littleton, Colorado
• Draper: Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Firefly Aerospace, Inc.: Cedar Park, Texas
• Intuitive Machines, LLC: Houston[, Texas]
• Lockheed Martin Space: Littleton, Colorado
• Masten Space Systems, Inc.: Mojave, California
• Moon Express: Cape Canaveral, Florida
• Orbit Beyond: Edison, New Jersey

The companies selected range from a major aerospace corporation, Lockheed Martin, to little-known startups, and from companies that were longtime competitors in the now-expired Google Lunar X Prize for commercial lunar landers to those that had not previously publicly expressed plans for such landers.

[...] In the press release announcing the winning companies, NASA said the companies are eligible for up to $2.6 billion in awards over the next ten years. The agency didn't disclose the maximum contract amounts for each company. The awards are all indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts, and it's not unusual for the actual value of such awards to be far less than the maximum value. For now, each company will receive a small, unspecified amount of funding to develop a payload users' guide. NASA will later compete individual task orders among the companies to fly specific payloads to the moon.

[...] NASA is providing no development money for any of the CLPS companies, who will have to raise the funding needed for their landers from other sources. Both Bridenstine and Zurbuchen acknowledged that some of the winners might not be able to deliver on their landers, while new companies may emerge that could be eligible to join the program through future "on-ramps."

Also at Space.com and Ars Technica.

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