Companies race to win ground transportation contracts for the moon

A lunar rover makes its way across rough terrain in August, navigating past rocky outcrops and around, or sometimes over, small craters. The topography in this case, is not the moon but instead in Colorado, at a site selected by Lunar Outpost to test the rovers it is developing for NASA and others.

In many respects, the landscape is far more benign than the moon. It lacks the extreme temperature swings, long day-night cycles, radiation and sharp-grained regolith found on the lunar surface. However, the terrestrial environment poses one hazard never found on the moon: grasshoppers.

“It confuses the sensors,” said Justin Cyrus, chief executive of Lunar Outpost, as he took reporters on a tour of the test site, located on part of a family ranch south of Pueblo. Those sensors on rover prototypes interpreted the hopping insects as flying dust.

Grasshoppers aside, the field tests have helped Lunar Outpost refine the design of a rover it is proposing to NASA for its Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) Services contract. The company was one of three chosen by NASA in April 2024 for initial design studies of LTV concepts. That work is now complete, and the companies have submitted new proposals to NASA to select one — or maybe more — late this year to be used on future Artemis missions.

If the Artemis missions are to catalyze further exploration of the moon and mark NASA’s shift from operator to customer in a growing lunar economy, much will depend on the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, a NASA program worth up to $4.6 billion over 10 years. With a decision on the contract just months away, NASA is weighing which design will carry its astronauts across the lunar surface.

In the initial phase of the LTV program, the companies received several million dollars to advance their rover designs through a preliminary design review, verifying that their designs meet NASA requirements. They have now submitted proposals to NASA for the next phase, covering development of one or more of the rovers.

Here’s where each contender stands.

Lunar Outpost’s Eagle

Lunar Outpost used the initial phase of the LTV Services program to build a series of rover prototypes that can be driven by astronauts, remotely operated or even travel autonomously. Those vehicles, developed at the company’s headquarters in the Denver suburbs, have been put through their paces a couple hundred kilometers south at the test site.

The testing process there resulted in some “pretty big upgrades” to what was originally proposed to NASA, Cyrus said in an interview. The rover now has larger wheels that can better handle obstacles, an improved suspension and a new suite of sensors, including cameras and lidar to provide a full view of the area around the rover out to a couple hundred meters.

“Human factors probably changed the most, which was driven by the testing we did,” he said. The driving included former astronauts who came to Lunar Outpost to pilot the rovers as well as tests at the Johnson Space Center involving astronauts wearing pressurized spacesuits. Those exercises resulted in changes to the rover’s crew cabin and how astronauts enter and exit the vehicle, climbing a few steps in the front of the rover, as well as how they access tools and storage containers on the rover.

“We’ve done seven iterations of astronaut pressurized suit testing and gotten to a point where it is very easy to get in and out of the vehicle,” he said.

There have also been changes in the team working with Lunar Outpost. When the company won the LTV award last April, Lockheed Martin was one of several firms involved, alongside General Motors, Goodyear and MDA Space. But last September, Lockheed Martin dropped out and was replaced by Leidos, after Lockheed and Lunar Outpost could not work out a teaming agreement.

The company has also gained spaceflight experience. Lunar Outpost flew its Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP) small robotic rover on the IM-2 lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines in March. However, the lander fell on its side when touching down, preventing the rover from exiting.

Despite MAPP not being able to explore the moon, flying that lunar rover “taught us a lot,” Cyrus said. That included data about rover systems collected during transit as well as demonstrating an operations center that could also be used for the LTV program.

“Obviously, we didn’t learn as many lessons as we would have liked,” he said. “We didn’t get to drive on the moon, but we did reach the moon and we were ready to drive.”

Astrolab’s FLEX and FLIP

Another LTV competitor, Astrolab, had already been working on a rover concept called Flexible Logistics and Exploration, or FLEX, when it won an LTV contract from NASA last year. The company has since been refining that design to support NASA’s requirements.
One FLEX design change that arose from NASA tests is where on the rover the astronauts are located. The earlier design had the astronauts at the rear of the rover.

“They were driving from behind, looking out over the chassis, like a boat captain’s perspective,” Jaret Matthews, chief executive of Astrolab, said in an interview.

Feedback from NASA astronauts testing the rover, including in spacesuits, led Astrolab to move the astronauts to the front of the rover. “They now have an unobstructed view ahead of them in the new orientation,” he explained.

Astrolab is also planning to test the technologies planned for FLEX on the moon. Last fall, the company said it would send a subscale prototype, called FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) to the moon. FLIP is scheduled to launch as soon as late this year on the first flight of Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander. That decision comes after NASA elected last year not to fly its own VIPER lunar rover on Griffin.

Technologies needed for FLEX, particularly the NASA LTV version, will be tested on FLIP. “Through the work on FLIP we’ve advanced a lot of the core technologies,” he said, such as the wheel actuators for the LTV rover.

“The FLIP mission has really pushed every corner of the business to a higher level,” Matthews said, from contracting to manufacturing planning. “We think we really set ourselves up for success on LTV by doing this.”

Astrolab has been working with Axiom Space on the LTV program, giving it access to that company’s work on the spacesuits that the Artemis astronauts will wear. “I got to wear the suits and experience it myself,” he said. “That gave us kind of a unique perspective on what the suit is capable of, what’s comfortable. That’s certainly informed our design.”

The company also has a longstanding strategic partnership with Venturi, the Monaco-based company known for its work in high-performance electric vehicles, with Venturi providing battery technology and “hyper-deformable” tires.

Venturi itself is interested in lunar rover development, and at the Paris Air Show in June showed off a design for a robotic lunar rover that it is proposing to develop in Europe for the European Space Agency. The design was highlighted in a stand at the air show that resembled an auto dealer’s showroom floor, with its own concept alongside Astrolab’s FLIP and FLEX.

Intuitive Machines’ Moon RACER

Intuitive Machines proposed a rover design called Moon Reusable Autonomous Crewed Exploration Rover, or Moon RACER, working with partners that include aerospace companies Boeing and Northrop Grumman as well as those from the automotive field, such as Michelin and Roush.

Despite that range of partners, Moon RACER is arguably more vertically integrated than competitors. The rover would be delivered by the Intuitive Machines’ own Nova-D lander, a larger version of its existing Nova-C lander. (Both Astrolab and Lunar Outpost plan to use SpaceX’s Starship to transport their rovers to the lunar surface.) It will also use a network of communications and navigation satellites that Intuitive Machines is developing for NASA and other customers.

Intuitive Machines has built and tested various prototypes as well. Like Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, it made changes to the rover based on astronaut feedback, making it easier to enter and exit the rover and improving access to payloads and equipment it carries.

“The team has effectively closed the loop between design, test and astronaut feedback,” Brett Fischer, lead for LTV work at Intuitive Machines, said after the company completed a preliminary design review for Moon RACER in June.

That included having another member of the rover team, mobility company AVL, build a simulator that incorporates actual rover subsystems to mimic what the actual rover would experience driving on the moon. “We believe this early capability will assist in LTV readiness, minimizing risk and costly prototype development,” Fischer said.

Contracting and commercialization

Having submitted their proposals to NASA, the three companies are waiting for the next phase of the LTV Services program, in which NASA will select one of them to develop and demonstrate the rover and then provide services for future NASA missions.

One sticking point is that NASA plans to select just one company for that next phase.

That is a departure from previous services contracts, from commercial cargo and crew to the Human Landing System landers, where NASA has picked two or more companies to provide redundancy. Agency officials said last year limited budgets forced NASA to go forward with just one provider.

“It’s always good to have two in case one’s running behind, or in case one doesn’t quite make it, or in case one runs into financial trouble,” Lunar Outpost’s Cyrus said. That happened recently when Collins Aerospace, one of two companies NASA picked to develop spacesuits under services contracts, dropped out, leaving NASA with only Axiom Space.

Some lawmakers in Congress agree. Language accompanying the House version of a commerce, justice and science spending bill for fiscal year 2026 calls for “the selection of no fewer than two contractors” for the LTV program, citing its importance in the overall architecture. The Senate version lacks similar language.

The companies also must negotiate the challenge of finding other customers for their rovers. With NASA’s plans for just one Artemis landing mission a year, spending up to a few weeks on the lunar surface, the LTV will be available the rest of the time for the company that operates it to offer to others for remote operations.

Exactly who those other customers would be is an open question, but the rover developers remain optimistic. Matthews said that Astrolab has a full complement of payloads from customers on its FLIP precursor rover, including from NASA and Interlune, a company with plans to harvest helium-3 from the moon. “It was surprisingly fast, especially because we didn’t really start talking about the mission publicly until about February.”

“Anytime you get a new capability that’s orders of magnitude less cost than historic capabilities, the pattern is that a new market is formed,” Cyrus said. His company’s MAPP rover, flown on IM-2, had customers ranging from MIT, which flew several research payloads, to Italian soccer club Juventus, which had a marketing partnership with the mission.

Cyrus said Lunar Outpost has letters of intent with several prospective Eagle customers, which he did not disclose. The company has financing lined up from investors and banks to fund its share of Eagle’s development cost, should NASA select it.

If NASA doesn’t select Eagle, Cyrus said, it would be a setback to Lunar Outpost but not fatal, with 60% of the company’s current revenues coming from customers other than NASA. “We would have to reevaluate things,” he acknowledged, since NASA choosing another rover design would be “a pretty big indicator that they are not in line with our vision of where lunar mobility should go.”

As he spoke, Lunar Outpost employees were putting two different prototypes of Eagle through their paces on the test range.

Cyrus said the company expects to build several more prototypes before getting to the version of Eagle that goes to the moon. The company is ready to start building the next prototype as soon as being selected by NASA so it can quickly go into testing to see how it handles simulated lunar terrain — and perhaps some grasshoppers.

This article first appeared in the September 2025 issue of SpaceNews Magazine with the title “Lunar rover showdown.”