Key facts
- NASA officials announced lunar contract awards and opportunities at a news conference in the week before November 11, 2026.
- Carlos García-Galán manages NASA's Moon Base Program and spoke at the news conference.
- Mike Gold, president of Redwire Space, said NASA issued five lunar contract proposals in seven days.
- NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said $2.6 billion in Gateway funding is being repurposed.
- NASA is buying services from companies including Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman, the report said.
Senior NASA officials held a news conference in the week before November 11, 2026, announcing a run of lunar contract awards, new contract opportunities and mission decisions covering landers, nuclear-powered rovers, scouting drones, power generation, storage and communication satellites, Ars Technica reported.
Carlos García-Galán, manager of the Moon Base Program, said at the conference, "Hopefully, we're keeping industry on their toes trying to catch up to all the solicitations we're doing." He added, "This is what it takes to do the Moon Base in the timeline we have set forth."
Mike Gold, president of Redwire Space and a former NASA associate administrator who set up the Artemis Accords, told Ars Technica that NASA issued five lunar contract proposals in seven days. "The pace that's occurring, and the nature of the procurements is unprecedented," Gold said. "You are seeing an all-hands-on-deck approach. Big companies, small companies, new companies, old companies."
According to the report, NASA has shifted to a flexible procurement model modeled on the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It uses Broad Agency Announcements that ask industry to state what capability it can provide rather than prescribing requirements, and a two-step process in which companies submit short white papers before NASA selects concepts for full proposals.
Gold said Redwire submitted initial proposals for several lunar opportunities and prepared a full proposal only for those NASA chose to pursue, including a variant of its roll-out solar arrays to generate power on the Moon.
The report said NASA is sourcing capabilities from Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman alongside newer entrants including Impulse Space, ispace-US, Voyager Technologies and Quantum Space, and is leaning on Relativity Space's Terran R rocket and Impulse Space orbital transfer vehicles. Ars Technica said the approach carries risk because some hardware is not yet operational or exists only as engineering designs.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said some funding is being repurposed from the shuttered Lunar Gateway program, including $2.6 billion NASA received for Gateway under the "One Big Beautiful Bill" act passed in 2025. "By doing a lot of littles, and learning from our approach and also putting some good wins on the board, we're demonstrating that we can be very efficient and responsible with taxpayer dollars," he said, adding that missions in the $200 million range could be added or dropped within a roughly $25 billion annual budget.