NASA will rent some cool wheels to drive around the moon.
Space agency officials announced Wednesday that they have hired three companies to come up with preliminary designs for vehicles that will carry NASA astronauts to the lunar south polar region in the coming years. After the astronauts return to Earth, these vehicles will be able to drive themselves as robotic explorers, similar to NASA’s Mars rovers.
Self-driving capability would also allow the vehicle to rendezvous with the next astronaut mission at a different location.
“Where it’s going, there are no roads,” Jacob Blitzer, NASA’s chief exploration scientist, said at a news conference Wednesday. “Its mobility will fundamentally change our view of the moon.”
The companies are Intuitive Machines of Houston, which in February successfully landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon. Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colo. and Venturi Astrolab of Hawthorne, Calif. Only one of the three will actually build a vehicle for NASA and send it to the moon.
NASA had requested proposals for what it called the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, or LTV, which could drive at speeds of up to 9.3 miles per hour, travel twelve miles on a single charge and allow astronauts to roam for eight hours .
The agency will work with the three companies for a year to further develop their plans. NASA will then select one of them for the demonstration phase.
The LTV will not be ready in time for the astronauts of Artemis III, the first landing in NASA’s lunar return program, currently scheduled for 2026.
The plan is to have LTV on the lunar surface before Artemis V, the third astronaut landing expected in 2030, said Lara Kearney, human surface mobility and extraterrestrial activity program manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
“If they can get there earlier, we’ll go earlier,” Ms Kearney said.
The LTV contract will be worth up to $4.6 billion over the next 15 years – five years of development and then a decade of operations on the moon, most of which goes to the winner of this competition. But Ms. Kearney said the contracts allow NASA to later fund the development of additional rovers or allow other companies to compete in the future.
The contract follows NASA’s recent strategy of buying services rather than hardware.
In the past, NASA paid aerospace companies to build vehicles that it then owned and operated. This included the Saturn V rocket, space shuttles and lunar rovers – popularly known as moon buggies – that astronauts drove to the moon during the last three Apollo missions in 1971 and 1972.
The new approach has proven successful and less expensive for transporting cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. NASA now pays companies, notably Elon Musk’s SpaceX, flat fees for these services, more akin to airline tickets or FedEx shipments.
For the company chosen to build the LTV, the vehicle will remain its property, and that company will be able to lease it to other customers when it is not needed by NASA.
“It is commercially available for us as a commercial enterprise to sell capacity on this rover,” said Steve Altemus, the CEO of Intuitive Machines, “and to do this for international partners and for other commercial companies and space agencies throughout the people”.
Competition has created alliances between small start-ups and larger, more established aerospace companies, as well as car companies. The Intuitive Machines group includes Boeing, Northrop Grumman and tire maker Michelin. Lunar Outpost added to its team Lockheed Martin, Goodyear and General Motors, which had helped design the Apollo moon buggies.
Astrolab is partnering with Houston-based Axiom Space, which has sent private astronauts to the space station and is building a commercial module on the International Space Station. Astrolab announced last year that it had signed a deal to send one of its rovers to the moon on a SpaceX Starship rocket as early as 2026. That mission is independent of whether it is selected by NASA, a company spokesman said.
While Lunar Outpost is competing with Intuitive Machines in this contract, it plans to work with the company separately, sending smaller robotic rovers to the moon with the company’s lunar progenitors.
