:MOMENT
July 2026. NASA quietly signed three contracts.
The $590M Commercial Bet
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:STATS
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:COUNTER
17 commercial lunar deliveries now locked in under CLPS
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:CHECKLIST
What the four 2028 missions will do
[ ] - Every lander carries the same three instruments: a Laser Retroreflector Array for   precision navigation, a dust sensor to study landing plumes, and a radiation mapper.
[ ] - The Laser Retroreflector Array is a passive cookie-sized dome of quartz prisms. It   reflects laser beams from orbiters to fix their position. No power needed, ever.
[ ] - Astrobotic's two missions will use updated Peregrine landers, the same design that   attempted the first US soft landing in 50 years in January 2024.
[ ] - Firefly's Griffin lander previously carried a NASA MAPP rover in 2025 and has a   larger payload bay than Peregrine, suited to heavier science packages.
[ ] - Intuitive Machines will use a variant of the Odysseus lander that made the first US   commercial soft landing on the Moon, near the south pole, in February 2024.
[ ] - All four landers target the south polar region, where water ice in permanently   shadowed craters could supply future crews with oxygen, water and rocket fuel.
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:INFO
Why the South Pole
All four 2028 missions are targeting the lunar south polar region, a strip of terrain unlike anywhere else in the solar system. Craters like Shackleton and Nobile are permanently shadowed: sunlight never reaches their floors. Temperatures sit at minus 170 Celsius year-round, and water ice deposited there billions of years ago has never evaporated. NASA's LCROSS impactor confirmed water in 2009. SOFIA confirmed it on sunlit slopes in 2020. The ice is real. Future crews could split it into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel and breathable air. That is why every mission goes south.
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:GALLERY
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:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Lori Glaze]
These new awards demonstrate our commitment to accelerating our effort to build a long-term presence on the lunar surface.
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:NOTE
One bonus in the contract announcement: NASA is considering repurposing PROMISE, an engineering development model of a Mars rover, and sending it to the Moon. It would be the first Mars-designed rover to operate on the lunar surface. No commitment yet, but the option is on the table.
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:NOTE
Each Laser Retroreflector Array lander places will gradually form a network of permanent location markers on the Moon, the same way GPS ground stations work on Earth. Once enough are placed, future landers and rovers can fix their position to within centimetres without relying on Earth-based tracking at all.
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:LINK
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/clps
NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services: the full programme overview