On Saturday, November 7, at the MAX POWER aerospace expo at Kennedy Space Center, NASA announced the contracting skeleton of its Moon Base — the permanent outpost it intends to build at the lunar South Pole.
The shape of it
- CLPS 2. Eight companies — Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX, and Voyager Technologies — are now eligible to compete for lunar surface delivery missions under a 10-year framework with a combined maximum value of $10 billion. Read that number the way NASA wrote it: a ceiling on a pool, not a check. Nothing is spent until a delivery is ordered and flown.
- CLPS 1.0 raised. The existing program’s ceiling rose from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion to fund the base’s first phase; it runs through November 2028, with awarded deliveries completing through 2033.
- PROMISE. The Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration: six wheels, nuclear-powered so it can work through the lunar night and inside shadowed craters, built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from spare flight hardware of the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers. Blue Origin holds a $94 million base contract — with a further $140 million on performance — to deliver it to the South Pole on its Mark 1 lander. Target: late 2028, for an 18-month mission, drilling a metre down and reading the ice.
- The freight system. Six launch and in-space transportation task orders worth roughly $1.3 billion combined (Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin, Impulse Space); a SpaceX Starship demonstration in 2028 to seed communications satellites in cislunar space; and the miniCAST tower — solar power plus wireless power transfer — with components from Honeybee Robotics, Redwire, and Yank Technologies.
In NASA’s own words
Administrator Jared Isaacman: “We are building the Moon Base mission by mission.” And the sentence the whole program hangs on:
Why this desk cares
Every previous lunar program was a visit. Apollo landed, worked, and came home — and the chronograph NASA flight-qualified in 1965 was specified for exactly that: sorties. A base is a different category of machine. It is cargo landed years ahead of crew, rovers that outlive winters, power that never sleeps. The Moonwatch story began in a test chamber in 1965 because NASA needed a watch that would not fail a mission. The missions are about to change character — from expeditions to residence — and everything that flies will be specified again, the same way, by the same playbook Isaacman named on Saturday: “Today’s announcements expand nearly every part of that campaign, using the playbook that carried NASA through its greatest eras: fly often, learn, apply those lessons, and get more better and more capable with every mission.”
We will be keeping the record in Mission Control, mission by mission, as the base gets built.
Sources: NASA RELEASE26-095 (Nov 7, 2026) — nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-awards-moon-base-transportation-technology-science-projects · NASA, “NASA Moon Base: November 2026 Update” (news conference video, Nov 7, 2026) · nasa.gov/moonbase. Figures are NASA’s; contract values are ceilings except where an award is stated.