Blue Origin wins NASA deal to ferry VIPER rover to lunar south pole

On Friday, Blue Origin won a major NASA contract to deliver a lunar rover to the moon, a strong vote of confidence in both the Blue Moon lander and the future of human exploration.

The contract also means that the VIPER rover will finally see the lunar surface after NASA shelved the entire program last year due to delays and cost overruns.

Under the deal, Blue Origin will carry VIPER – short for “Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover” – on its uncrewed Blue Moon Mk1 lander. Separately, NASA has awarded the company a human-rated lander contract under Artemis, but that program is distinct from this mission.

This new award was granted under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services task order for roughly $190 million. Blue Moon Mk1 is targeting a site near the lunar south pole, where scientists suspect there are significant stores of water ice. VIPER will drill down into the surface to test that hypothesis.

The decision closes an uncertain chapter for VIPER. The agency first selected Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic in 2020 to deliver the rover on its Griffin lander, an award initially valued at $199.5 million. After delays on both the rover and lander, NASA canceled VIPER in July 2024, citing ballooning costs, even though much of the hardware was already built.

The move drew criticism from lawmakers and scientists. One month later, NASA issued a request for ideas from U.S. companies to explore ways to put the existing rover to work without adding additional costs to the government.

For Blue Origin, this win is important: this award gives the cargo workhorse lander its first high-profile scientific payload and pins it to a schedule, late 2027. It also marks a second major NASA endorsement of the company’s lunar ambitions after the Human Landing System contract.

About the size of a golf cart, VIPER will spend roughly 100 days on the lunar surface, driving around, prospecting and drilling to map water ice deposits. The rover is equipped with several instruments, including the drill and three spectrometers designed to detect water, hydrogen and other minerals.

The results are key to NASA’s future science goals and to any long-term human presence on the moon, where extracting resources in-situ – rather than hauling them from Earth – will be critical. Ice could one day be turned into drinking water, oxygen, and even rocket propellant.