Short answers, pulled from the story.
Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, is a NASA program that purchases end-to-end payload delivery services from private companies using fixed-price contracts. Contractors handle everything from launch vehicles and landers to surface operations, and NASA fills those spacecraft with science instruments. The combined maximum contract value across the first nine eligible companies was $2.6 billion over ten years.
Intuitive Machines made the first commercial lunar landing in history with the IM-1 mission in 2024. The company's Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, launched on the 15th of February 2024 and set down near Malapert-A, becoming the first private spacecraft to reach the lunar surface.
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1 achieved the first fully successful CLPS landing on the 2nd of March 2025. The spacecraft touched down in Mare Crisium at approximately 3:30 in the morning Eastern Time, carrying ten NASA instruments.
Most CLPS missions target the south pole because permanently shadowed craters there may preserve ancient water ice. NASA plans to extract those resources through in situ resource utilization, or ISRU, potentially supplying future crews with water and rocket propellant produced on-site rather than launched from Earth.
NASA set a working cost assumption of one million dollars per kilogram for payload delivery to the lunar surface under CLPS. The agency acknowledged that figure might be revised once actual missions provided real cost data.
Masten Space Systems received a $75.9 million CLPS contract in April 2020 to deliver payloads to the Moon's south pole with its XL-1 lander. The company filed for bankruptcy in July 2022, causing the mission to be cancelled. Nearly all of Masten's assets were sold to Astrobotic Technology.