spacetoday.net: NASA awards four more lunar lander missions

Posted: Sat, Jul 4, 2026, 8:06 PM ET (0006 GMT)
NASA awarded four more lunar lander missions Tuesday as the agency considers sending a Mars rover prototype to the moon. NASA announced Tuesday it will send four landers to the moon in late 2028: two built by Astrobotic and one each by Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines. The awards have a combined value of $590 million. The landers will carry an identical set of payloads that include instruments to measure radiation levels and the cloud of regolith created by the landers' engines. NASA also said at the briefing it was studying modifying an engineering model of the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers, currently used for testing at JPL, into a lunar rover. That rover, dubbed PROMISE, would use a nuclear power source like its Martian counterparts to enable long-term lunar exploration without solar power limitations. NASA did not disclose when PROMISE might fly or at what cost.