NASA’s secret weapon in the lunar space race may be … procurement reform?

Senior NASA officials held a lengthy news conference last weekend, laying out a series of lunar contract awards, new contract opportunities, and mission decisions. They followed one after the other: landers, nuclear-powered rovers, scouting drones, power generation, storage, and communication satellites.

It never seemed to end.

“Hopefully, we’re keeping industry on their toes trying to catch up to all the solicitations we’re doing,” said Carlos García-Galán, manager of the Moon Base Program, more than 90 minutes into the news conference. “This is what it takes to do the Moon Base in the timeline we have set forth.”

The rapid-fire announcement of awards tells us a few things about NASA’s efforts to return to the Moon and establish a durable settlement there during the next decade.

First, the agency is serious about this effort—the Artemis Moon Base program represents the most credible effort to establish a permanent outpost on another world in NASA’s history. Second, NASA is reaching out to all corners of the US commercial space industry, casting an extraordinarily wide net to reach companies that have yet to fly any hardware into orbit. Third, NASA is getting creative about how it’s buying these services, and this may matter most of all.

Changing way NASA buys stuff

There was a lot packed into the announcements this weekend, so to make sense of it all, I called Mike Gold, a lawyer and former NASA associate administrator who set up the Artemis Accords, who is now the president of Redwire Space. He was at NASA at the beginning of Artemis and understands what it takes to get the government moving. He said he was blown away. During a period of seven days, Gold said, NASA put out five proposals for lunar contracts.

“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.”

What has impressed Gold most about NASA’s strategy since announcing the Moon Base in March, at the Ignition event, has been the agency’s evolving procurement strategy. The space agency has adopted a flexible procurement strategy similar to one used by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

There are two components. NASA has largely used a mechanism called Broad Agency Announcements, which ask for a capability such as providing power on the surface of the Moon. This allows NASA to ask industry for ideas without being too prescriptive and levying a bunch of requirements. It’s rather like instead of telling industry precisely what it wants, NASA asks industry what it can do.

Critically, Gold said, the space agency has also used a DARPA-style preliminary proposal process. In response to a traditional procurement, interested companies would prepare a detailed proposal, often running dozens, if not hundreds, of pages. This required an extraordinary amount of time.

With the Moon Base, NASA is employing a two-step process. After NASA announces the need for a service, interested companies submit a short white paper describing their solution. After a short review, NASA identifies the concepts it wants to pursue further, and only then do companies invest the time and resources to prepare a detailed proposal.

Gold said several lunar opportunities interested Redwire, and the company submitted initial proposals in response. But it only had to prepare a full proposal for opportunities that NASA wanted to pursue, including using a variant of its roll-out solar arrays on the Moon to generate power.

“We were able to focus the lion’s share of our resources in what the agency really wanted and what we were best at,” he said.

An all-hands-on-deck approach

From this shift, it seems clear that NASA is trying to move away from micromanaging every individual lunar-base subsystem and instead seeks to coordinate independently developed commercial capabilities. The space agency is sourcing them from everywhere, from major contractors like Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Northrop Grumman to relatively new startups such as Impulse Space, ispace-US, Voyager Technologies, Quantum Space, and more.

With questions emerging about how committed SpaceX is to NASA work in the future, the space agency appears to be seeking to diversify the way it gets cargo to the Moon. For example, it is leaning into Relativity Space and its large (but unproven) Terran R rocket, as well as orbital transfer vehicles built by Impulse Space. NASA is prioritizing the creation of a whole ecosystem of potential contractors rather than relying on one or two primes.

In doing so, NASA is taking a big risk. It is attempting to accelerate its lunar program by buying services from companies whose hardware is not yet operational and, in some cases, exists only as advanced engineering designs. For NASA, ultimately, it is a high-risk, high-reward approach. But in a demanding contest with China to reach and establish settlements on the Moon, NASA’s post-Apollo timidity is no longer tenable.

So how will NASA pay for all of the new stuff? Some of the funding is being repurposed from the previously shuttered Lunar Gateway program, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said. For example, as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” act passed in 2025, NASA received $2.6 billion for the Gateway. Some of the funding was already appropriated through the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program.

Moreover, Isaacman said, some of these contracts are relatively small and will enable NASA to invest more down the road in successful services.

“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. With this approach, he added, “You give future administrations the option of how they can dial up or down missions. Some of these missions in the, call it, $200 million range between launch, lander, and payload; potentially, you can add those or drop those inside a $25 billion approximate budget per year without putting the entire program at risk.”

Eric BergerSenior Space Editor
Eric BergerSenior Space Editor
Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

Source: arstechnica.com