NASA is going to borrow some fancy wheels to drive around the moon.
Space agency officials announced Wednesday that they have hired three companies to come up with preliminary designs for a vehicle that will take NASA astronauts to the lunar south pole over the next few years. After the astronauts return to Earth, the vehicle will be a self-driving robotic explorer similar to NASA's Mars Rover.
Autonomous driving capabilities will also allow the vehicle to carry out the next astronaut mission from a different location.
“There’s no way it’s going where it’s going,” Jacob Bleacher, NASA’s chief exploration scientist, said at a news conference Wednesday. “Its mobility will fundamentally change our view of the Moon.”
The company is Intuitive Machines of Houston, which successfully landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon last February. Golden Moon Outpost, Colorado; and Venturi Astrolab in Hawthorne, California. Only one of the three will actually build a vehicle for NASA and send it to the moon.
NASA has requested proposals for a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) that can travel at speeds of up to 9.3 miles per hour, travel 12 miles on a single charge, and keep astronauts on the road for eight hours.
The agency plans to work with the three companies for a year to further develop the design. NASA will then select one of them for the demonstration phase.
The LTV will not be ready in time for astronauts on Artemis III, the first landing of NASA's lunar return program, currently scheduled for 2026.
LTV's goal is to reach the lunar surface ahead of Artemis V, expected to be the third astronaut landing in 2030, said Lara Kearney, extravehicular activities and human surface mobility program manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
“If they could get there earlier, we would get there earlier,” Mr. Kearney said.
The LTV contract could be worth up to $4.6 billion over the next 15 years. This means that after 5 years of development and 10 years of operation on the moon, most of the money will go to the winner of this competition. But Mr. Kearney said the contract would allow NASA to later fund additional rover development or allow other companies to compete in the future.
The contract follows NASA's recent strategy of purchasing services rather than hardware.
In the past, NASA paid aerospace companies to build vehicles that it would then own and operate. These included the Saturn V rocket, the Space Shuttle, and the Lunar Exploration Vehicle, popularly known as the Moon Buggy, which drove astronauts on the Moon during the last three Apollo missions in 1971 and 1972.
The new approach has proven successful and inexpensive to transport cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. NASA now pays companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX a flat fee for their services. This is similar to airplane tickets or FedEx shipping.
For companies that choose to build LTV, the vehicles remain the property of that company, and those companies can lease them to other customers when they are not needed by NASA.
“Commercially, we can sell the rover’s capacity and do that for our international partners and other commercial companies and space agencies around the world,” said Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines.
Competition has led to the formation of alliances between small startups and larger, more established aerospace and automotive companies. The Intuitive Machines team includes Boeing, Northrop Grumman and tire manufacturer Michelin. Lunar Outpost joins the teams of Lockheed Martin, Goodyear and General Motors that helped design the Apollo moon buggy.
Astrolab is working with Houston's Axiom Space, which is sending private astronauts to the space station and building commercial modules for the International Space Station. Astrolab announced last year that it had signed a contract to send one of its rovers to the moon aboard a SpaceX Starship rocket in early 2026. The mission is independent of whether NASA selects it or not, a company spokeswoman said.
Lunar Outpost is competing with Intuitive Machines for this contract, but plans to work separately with the company to send smaller robotic rovers to the moon via the company's lunar lander.