The selection, announced May 26, narrows a field that began with three companies competing for an LTV contract NASA announced in 2024. That original competition would have produced a single rover capable of surviving on the lunar surface for a decade. Instead, NASA asked companies for a simpler design that could be ready in time for the first crewed landing, currently scheduled for early 2028.<\/p>\n
Ryan Stephan, NASA’s acting director for cargo landers, said the agency plans to keep the LTVs roughly two kilometers from landing sites to protect against plume surface interaction. The vehicles will traverse in to pick up crew, perform missions of up to about 10 kilometers during the crewed period, and accumulate a total of 400 kilometers over their lifetime.<\/p>\n
Astrolab’s offering is the Crewed Lunar Vehicle, or CLV-1, built on lessons from the company’s FLEX rover and smaller FLIP rover. Jaret Matthews, Astrolab’s CEO and founder, said FLIP was always intended as a test bed for the LTV, with large tires, overpowered wheel actuators, and large batteries directly transferable to CLV. FLIP is scheduled to fly on Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 mission later this year aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. Matthews said the FLIP rover is designed to survive 100 hours of lunar night, while CLV-1 is slated for 150 days of darkness, using large onboard battery capacity and covering its radiator with solar arrays to limit heat loss.<\/p>\n
Lunar Outpost drew on its larger Eagle LTV and its MAPP robotic rovers, one of which flew on Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission in 2025. Andrew Gemer, the company’s co-founder and chief financial officer, said its Pegasus mission would mark the first human-robot interaction with astronaut crews on the lunar surface. Lunar Outpost already has static human-in-the-loop mockups of Pegasus and plans full-scale drivable prototypes for astronaut training, with flight hardware qualification arriving at delivery to NASA in November 2027.<\/p>\n
A potential obstacle is reaching the Moon. In this procurement, NASA took control of securing launch and landing and selected Blue Origin to fly the LTVs on its Blue Moon Mark 1 lander atop a New Glenn rocket. The May 28 explosion of the New Glenn intended for the NG-4 mission destroyed Blue Origin’s only operational launch pad. CEO Dave Limp said the company aims to resume New Glenn launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station by the end of the year, with the first Blue Moon Mk.1 cargo lander now flying in early 2027 rather than this summer.<\/p>\n
Carlos Garc\u00eda-Gal\u00e1n, program executive for NASA’s Moon Base program, said the anomaly underscored why NASA wants landers and payloads to become agnostic of launch vehicles. He said the team is focused on understanding what happened, rebuilding infrastructure, and returning to nominal operations, while looking at different options to continue the mission without significant delays.<\/p>\n
Watch for Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 mission carrying FLIP later this year, the upcoming IM-3 mission carrying a Lunar Outpost rover, Blue Origin’s planned return to New Glenn launches by year’s end, and the November 2027 LTV delivery target.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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