NASA's Moon Base awards finally put a drill on the ice
Saturday's stack of contracts includes PROMISE, a nuclear rover built from Mars spares that will dig a meter down at the south pole. The rest of the list is freight and power, which is where the hiring is.
Back on Oct. 21 we wrote that NASA’s Moon Base rovers would only count as a prospecting program if the payload list carried real instruments, a drill above all. On Saturday, at the MAX POWER expo at Kennedy Space Center, NASA answered that. PROMISE, the Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration, will carry a drill that pulls regolith from about 1 meter down to characterize ice, along with spectrometers, temperature and radiation sensors, and cameras.
Two details make it more than a brochure rover. It runs on nuclear power, so it can keep working through the lunar night and inside the permanently shadowed regions where the ice is thought to sit. Solar vehicles mostly peer in from the rim. And JPL is assembling it from spare flight parts and engineering test models left over from Curiosity and Perseverance. Payload reports that NASA expects the mission to cost under $400 million. Blue Origin will land it on a Mark 1 lander under a $94 million base contract with a $140 million option, aiming for a late 2028 launch and an 18-month mission.
Eighteen months of drilling at the pole is the dataset every ice-mining business plan has been missing. Orbital hydrogen maps say where to look. Only cores tell you grade, depth, and whether ice is mixed through the soil or packed in layers. A late 2028 launch plus a full mission puts that answer around mid-2030, which is roughly when excavation hardware would need firm design numbers anyway.
The rest of the announcement is less exciting and probably matters more for paychecks. NASA picked eight companies for CLPS 2, a 10-year lunar delivery contract worth up to $10 billion combined and aimed at landers carrying 2 to 6 metric tons: Blue Origin, Firefly, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SpaceX and Voyager. It raised the original CLPS ceiling from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion. Six launch and orbital-transfer task orders worth about $1.3 billion went out, flying on New Glenn, Terran R and Falcon 9. And NASA bought parts for a small solar and communications tower, miniCAST, from Honeybee Robotics, Redwire and Yank Technologies, with a solicitation for full power systems expected in early 2027. Redwire’s Mike Gold told Payload that regolith, not China, is “the number one enemy on the Moon.”
Read that list as a hiring map. Landers, space tugs and power hardware need test engineers, technicians, welders and flight software people years before anyone extracts a gram of water. Blue Origin appears in nearly every line item, and its open roles already include Honeybee Robotics test engineering and software jobs on its lunar program. Relativity Space, SpaceX and ispace are hiring as well, and the jobs board has the rest.
What we’ll watch: whether PROMISE holds its 2028 date, and whether NASA publishes the drill data openly. Open core data would cut the entry cost for every small resource company that can’t afford its own rover. For background, see lunar water ice explained and ISRU basics.
Mars Mining Co. is an independent news site. It is not affiliated with NASA, JAXA, ESA, SpaceX or any company mentioned. Nothing here is investment advice. Full disclaimer.