NASA’s Moon Base Plan Adds Two Rovers for Its Astronauts

NASA awarded two companies contracts on Tuesday to develop 21st-century versions of the moon buggies astronauts drove in the Apollo missions of the early 1970s.

Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colo., and Venturi Astrolab of Hawthorne, Calif., will each receive about $220 million to build the vehicles.

Carlos García-Galán, who heads NASA’s program to build a moon base over the coming decade, said the space agency wanted to have a rover ready on the moon when the next astronauts arrived. That could be as soon as 2028, when the mission known as Artemis IV is scheduled to touch down.

“It’s absolutely an objective,” Mr. García-Galán said during a news conference on Tuesday that provided an update on NASA’s plans for building an outpost on the moon.

The two new rovers — what NASA calls lunar terrain vehicles, or L.T.V.s — will be much more capable than their Apollo predecessors. Each will weigh about one metric ton, will have the capability to drive up and down 20-degree slopes and will be able carry two astronauts. When no astronauts are around, the rovers will be able to drive themselves around, or drivers on Earth could take the wheel remotely.

Both vehicles have more modest designs than what NASA had originally sought four years ago. At that time, NASA asked companies to make proposals for what was essentially a 10-year rental car service on the surface of the moon. The L.T.V. requirements then included a robotic arm and a top speed of 9.3 miles per hour. But in 2024, when NASA announced the finalists, which included Lunar Outpost and Astrolab, the space agency said that only one winner would be selected and that it did not expect the vehicle to be ready until 2030.

When Jared Isaacman became NASA administrator this year, he decided to scale back the requirements and speed up the schedule. The required top speed is lower, at 6.2 miles per hour; the robotic arm has been dropped; and instead of a 10-year contract, NASA is now asking for it to last just a year.

That will allow astronauts to take moon drives sooner. “I have no doubt they’ll come back and give us feedback that will inform” the design of improved vehicles in the future, Mr. Isaacman said.

For Lunar Outpost and Astrolab, the accelerated timeline led to a mad dash to come up with new designs to squeeze into NASA’s new specifications, which were released in late March. Proposals were due on May 1.

“We were able to put together a really credible response, because we had done so much work in the prior phase,” Jaret Matthews, the chief executive of Astrolab, said in an interview.

The two companies now have to race again to build the rovers in 18 months. But Justin Cyrus, the chief executive of Lunar Outpost, pointed out that the lunar vehicle used by the Apollo astronauts was developed in just 17 months.

“So we have one more month than they had during Apollo,” Mr. Cyrus said. “It’s going to be tight, but it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

NASA also announced that Blue Origin, the rocket company started by Jeff Bezos, had been awarded a contract worth up to $468 million to take the rovers to the moon.

On Tuesday, NASA also awarded a $75 million to Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, to carry four robotic drones, under development at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, to provide reconnaissance of the lunar surface in the south pole region, where the Artemis astronauts will land.

Those drones will be able to quickly hop from one place to the next.

“It will help us build a digital terrain map of different landing sites on the moon and prospect moon base sites,” Mr. García-Galán said. “So all of those things are going to be critical for continuing understanding of where we’re going.”