NASA selected three commercial companies—Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, and Intuitive Machines—to execute four Moon landings planned for late 2028 under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The total contract value is nearly $600 million, split as $297.9 million for Astrobotic’s two deliveries, $144.2 million for Firefly’s one, and $148.3 million for Intuitive Machines’ one.
Each mission will carry the same trio of science instruments: a lunar navigation payload, a dust-studies payload, and a radiation-mapping payload. That combination is operationally important because accurate surface navigation, dust behavior during landings, and localized radiation exposure are core requirements for safe crewed habitation, cargo delivery, and long-duration infrastructure on the Moon.
For the Ark team, the key action is to track instrument performance, landing-site data, and any design upgrades to the commercial landers, because these missions are effectively test flights for the logistics layer of a permanent lunar settlement. Priority research areas are dust suppression, radiation shielding requirements, and precision landing/navigation standards that can be reused for habitat siting, resupply corridors, and emergency evacuation planning.