Blue Origin only bidder for new VIPER lander award

WASHINGTON — Blue Origin was the sole bidder for a NASA task order that revived a canceled lunar rover mission.

NASA announced Sept. 19 it had selected Blue Origin to deliver the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, to the moon’s south polar region in late 2027. The rover will fly on the second mission of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander.

The award came through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program. Many were surprised because NASA had previously awarded a CLPS task order to Astrobotic to deliver VIPER on its Griffin lander. The agency kept that task order when it canceled VIPER in July 2024, citing cost and schedule overruns.

NASA had not publicly signaled plans to use CLPS to secure a new ride for VIPER. A July 25 presentation by Mark Clampin, deputy associate administrator for science, to the National Academies’ Space Studies Board did not list the CS-7 task order among past and future CLPS missions running through 2029.

In a response to SpaceNews, the agency said it reviewed options from April to June for alternative ways to deliver VIPER. In May, NASA ended plans for a commercial partnership, saying it was exploring “alternative approaches.”

NASA ultimately adopted a “base plus option” structure, with an initial award for design work and an option for the landing mission. Exercising that option will depend on Blue Moon’s modifications to accommodate VIPER and on a successful landing of Blue Moon’s first mission, scheduled for as soon as late this year. The total value of the task order is $190 million.

“In July, NASA queried the CLPS vendor pool to determine vendors had the capability to meet NASA’s specific requirements for delivery of VIPER to the moon,” the agency said. “Based on the results of that query, NASA issued to the CLPS vendors a Request for Task Order Proposals in August.”

NASA said only one proposal came in, from Blue Origin. “The agency evaluated the submission in accordance with standard procurement procedures and determined it met NASA’s requirements, leading to this award.”

Blue Origin may have been the only viable option. VIPER weighs 450 kilograms, too large for smaller landers that have already gone to the moon such as Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost or Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C.

Astrobotic declined to bid on CS-7 with Griffin. “Given the compressed timeline of the CS-7 mission and our commitments to existing customers, Astrobotic made the strategic decision not to submit a bid,” the company said Sept. 19.

SpaceX is also part of the CLPS program but has yet to win a CLPS task order for its Starship lunar lander, a version of which will carry astronauts through NASA’s Human Landing System program.

Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, offered few details about the Blue Origin decision when asked at a Sept. 21 press conference about the upcoming launch of three space weather missions.

“At the time, we did not have a path forward for the VIPER mission with a lander,” she said of the 2024 cancellation. “We’ve gone through a number of steps to find the right ride. It was solicited through a CLPS payload call, so our CLPS vendors were able to propose and we were very excited about the successful proposal coming in from Blue Origin.”

Reviving VIPER also creates staffing challenges. NASA told SpaceNews that personnel assigned to VIPER were reassigned to other work in March.

“With this CS-7 award, NASA will initiate and staff a new, follow-on project to operate VIPER on the moon and conduct measurements using VIPER’s science instruments,” the agency said. That project will be based at Ames Research Center, which managed the original VIPER effort, with support from Johnson Space Center. “NASA has not yet defined whether the scope of this new operations effort will be the same as the originally planned VIPER project.”