NASA awarded two companies contracts on Tuesday to develop 21st-century versions of the lunar vehicles that astronauts rode in the Apollo missions of the early 1970s.
Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colo., and Venturi Astrolab of Hawthorne, Calif., will each receive about $220 million to build the vehicles.
Carlos García-Galán, who heads NASA’s program to build a lunar base over the next decade, said the space agency wanted to have a rover ready on the moon when the next astronauts arrived. It could be as soon as 2028, when the mission known as Artemis IV is scheduled to land.
“It’s definitely a goal,” Mr García-Galán said during a news conference on Tuesday giving an update on NASA’s plans to build an outpost on the moon.
The two new rovers — what NASA calls lunar terrain vehicles, or LTVs — will be much more capable than their Apollo predecessors. Each will weigh about a ton, will have the ability to drive up and down 20-degree slopes and will be able to carry two astronauts. When no astronauts are around, the rovers will be able to drive themselves around, or drivers on Earth can take the wheel remotely.
Both vehicles have more modest designs than what NASA had originally sought four years ago. At the time, NASA asked companies to come up with proposals for what was essentially a 10-year rental car service on the lunar surface. The LTV requirements then included a robotic arm and a top speed of 9.3 miles per hour. But in 2024, when NASA announced the finalists, which included the Lunar Outpost and Astrolab, the space agency said only one winner would be selected and that it did not expect the vehicle to be ready until 2030.
When Jared Isaacman became NASA administrator this year, he decided to scale back the requirements and speed up the schedule. The claimed top speed is lower, at 6.2 miles per hour; the robot arm has been lost; and instead of a 10-year contract, NASA is now asking that it last only one year.
It will allow astronauts to take the moon faster. “I have no doubt they will come back and give us feedback that will inform” the design of improved vehicles in the future, Mr. Isaacman.
For the Lunar Outpost and Astrolab, the accelerated timeline led to a mad dash to come up with new designs to meet NASA’s new specifications, which were released in late March. Proposal occurred on 1 May.
“We were able to put together a really credible response because we had done so much work in the preliminary phase,” Jaret Matthews, CEO of Astrolab, said in an interview. “We have to deliver a rover to NASA by the end of next year, so it was a challenge to put together a proposal that made a credible path to that in a short amount of time.”
NASA also announced that Blue Origin, the rocket company started by Jeff Bezos, had been awarded a contract worth up to $468 million to take rovers to the moon.
On Tuesday, NASA also awarded $75 million to Firefly Aerospace in Cedar Park, Texas, to carry four robotic drones, under development at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, to provide reconnaissance of the lunar surface in the south polar region where the Artemis astronauts will land.
These drones will be able to quickly jump from one place to the next.
“It will help us build a digital terrain map of different landing sites on the moon and views of lunar base sites,” García-Galán said. “So all of these things will be critical to continued understanding of where we’re going.”
