NASA used a big stage on Saturday to show how it plans to build a permanent presence at the Moon’s South Pole. At the MAX POWER aerospace expo and air show at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the agency announced a nuclear-powered rover, a new multi-billion-dollar lunar delivery contract and a batch of launch and infrastructure awards. Here’s what’s in the package, based on NASA’s official news release from November 7.

Meet PROMISE, the nuclear-powered Moon rover

The headline item is PROMISE, short for Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration. The six-wheeled rover will land at the lunar South Pole to study the surface and what lies beneath it, assess resources, and help pick landing sites for future missions.

Because it’s nuclear-powered, PROMISE can keep working through long lunar nights and inside permanently shadowed regions, the cold, dark craters where scientists think water ice may be hiding. It will carry a drill to pull up regolith from about 1 meter below the surface, plus spectrometers, temperature and radiation sensors, and cameras.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will manage the mission and build the rover from spare flight parts and engineering test models originally made for the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers. NASA says reusing proven hardware significantly cuts cost and shortens the timeline. The agency is targeting a launch in late 2028 and an 18-month mission. Blue Origin received a $94 million base contract, with an option worth an additional $140 million, to deliver PROMISE to the South Pole on its Mark 1 lander.

A $10 billion lander contract

To keep cargo flowing, NASA picked eight companies for the next phase of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, called CLPS 2: Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, ispace-U.S., Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies. They’ll be eligible to compete for future delivery missions under a 10-year contract with a combined maximum value of $10 billion. NASA also raised the value of the original CLPS contract from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion.

Rides to the Moon and space “freight trucks”

NASA awarded six task orders, worth about $1.3 billion combined, to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space to integrate and transport Moon Base cargo. These missions will test orbital transfer vehicles, which NASA compares to long-distance freight trucks, and fly projects such as the CAPSTONE 02 spacecraft and MoonFall scouting drones. Some will launch on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Relativity Space’s Terran R and SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

NASA also chose SpaceX to launch communications satellites to cislunar space aboard a Starship in 2028, as a test for future lunar communications networks.

Power and communications on the surface

For infrastructure, NASA plans to buy parts for a Mini-Communications and Solar Tower, or miniCAST. Honeybee Robotics will work on energy storage, Redwire on power generation and Yank Technologies on wireless power transfer, with assembly and testing at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. NASA expects a separate call for fully integrated power systems in early 2027.

What NASA’s leaders said

“We are building the Moon Base mission by mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “When our astronauts return to the Moon, they will arrive with the first elements of the Moon Base already waiting for them on the surface.”

Why it matters

Taken together, these awards show NASA’s strategy: lean on commercial companies for delivery and transport, reuse proven hardware where possible, and pre-position equipment before astronauts arrive. PROMISE is the piece to watch, since it could tell scientists how much usable ice exists at the South Pole, and that answer shapes everything from life support to fuel for future missions. You can follow updates at NASA’s Moon Base page.

Image: Concept for Base at the Lunar South Pole (liveenable-im4-craterlogistics-1) by NASA via Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain Mark 1.0