NASA Awards $590M in Moon Base Landings, Blue Origin Redesigns New Glenn Pad, Firefly Sets 2028 Sweden Debut

NASA put roughly $590 million of Moon Base work on contract on Tuesday, splitting four late-2028 landings between Astrobotic ($297.9 million for two Peregrine deliveries), Firefly Aerospace ($144.2 million for a sixth Blue Ghost mission) and Intuitive Machines ($148.3 million for one flight). Each lander will fly a common trio of NASA payloads, and the agency previewed additional solicitations for a power and avionics demo, a South Pole optical imager, a lunar comms and navigation relay constellation, and a possible PROMISE rover derived from Mars Perseverance and Curiosity hardware.

CEO Dave Limp said Blue Origin will rebuild LC-36 around a hybrid horizontal-vertical configuration originally designed for the larger New Glenn 9x4 variant, using a crane in place of the destroyed transporter-erector, with early analysis of the May 28 hotfire explosion pointing to the aft section of the first stage. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said New Glenn remains "plan A" for the Blue Moon Mk1 cargo lander and that the agency has room into 2027 before getting nervous.

Firefly and Sweden's SSC Space set a 2028 target for the first orbital Alpha launch from Esrange's Launch Complex 3C, backed by US-Sweden cooperation agreements and a SEK 209 million ($21.5 million) contract from Sweden's defense procurement agency.

Around those anchors, Abu Dhabi's MGX closed a $49 billion AI fund that has backed OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI ahead of its merger with SpaceX; the FCC scheduled a July 22 vote on auctioning 160 MHz of upper C-band spectrum, with SES already estimating $3.6 billion in clearing costs for five new hybrid Ku-band satellites; Amazon, Iridium, Globalstar and Telesat launched the SpaceConnect Association to lobby on NGSO spectrum without SpaceX; and L3Harris ran its first full-scale solid fuel ramjet test in Virginia as a step toward tactical missile flight testing.