Fly Me to the Moon

Traffic to the Moon is starting to boom through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. U.S. companies are delivering a regular cadence of missions that are an appetizer to future Artemis landings scheduled for later in the decade while testing new tech and conducting experiments to collect more surface data.  

Starting this year’s activities, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander successfully touched down early morning on March 2, 2025, delivering a suite of 10 NASA payloads to provide insights into the Moon’s environment and work out new equipment to support astronauts landing on the lunar surface. If the data collected over its two-week mission is anything like the imagery that was returned during its transit and landing, there will be plenty of happy scientists. Firefly has two more Blue Ghost missions lined up through CLPS in 2026 and 2028 that will include a mission to the far side of the moon to deploy a radio telescope and an ESA communications relay satellite to provide coverage for future polar and far side missions on the Moon without direct line-of-sight to Earth.  

Later this week, Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 second lunar mission Athena will land on March 6. The mission has several ambitious payloads, including the Polar Resources Ice Mining experiment, designed to drill into the Moon’s surface to collect and analyze samples; the Micro Nova “hopper” drone to jump in and out of permanently shadowed regions around the lander and survey the lunar surface along its flight path, and Lunar Outpost’s lunar robot rover, a first for the U.S. Supporting communications between vehicle and the lander will be Nokia’s 4G/LTE cellular communication system, the first off-planet application of cellular technology. (No roaming jokes, please.)  

This fall, U.S. lunar robotics are expected to continue with the IM-3 mission slated for October and Astrobotic Griffin-1 planning a landing at the South Pole at the end of the year. Both missions will deploy rovers, with IM-3 delivering the first cooperative robotic swarm to the Reiner Gamma region. Astrobotic’s Griffin lander will deliver the FLIP-1 rover, a 500kg vehicle that will demonstrate and test a number of components and subsystems in the harsh lunar environment.  

With multiple lander options demonstrated and more in the pipeline, including Blue Origin’s Blue Moon and Starship HLS, NASA is building a sustainable ecosystem for lunar exploration and future commercial activity. Keep in mind that the Apollo program put all of its chips on a single robotic lander program, Surveyor, and the crewed Lunar Module. Today, NASA has a much larger toolkit and healthy redundancies, while competition between vendors drives innovation and lowers costs. 

NASA’s robotic partners are also providing inspiration for the next generation of scientists and explorers. Students building robots in the classroom today need only look up to imagine how their current projects could lead them to their future careers.  

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