Firefly Aerospace has secured a $112 million contract to help NASA deploy one satellite and two payloads sometime in 2026 as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.
The Texas-based space transportation builder will be responsible for integrating and delivering payloads from Earth to the moon’s surface and orbit, NASA said Wednesday.
For the mission, Firefly will build a transfer vehicle for the European Space Agency’s communications and data relay satellite Lunar Pathfinder to reach lunar orbit. ESA partnered with its US counterpart to procure commercial lunar delivery services.
One of the payloads for the mission is the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night, a collaborative effort of NASA, the University of California and the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.
NASA added that a user terminal payload will support Lunar Pathfinder commissioning and LuSEE-Night communications.
In 2021, Firefly booked a $93.3 million task order from the agency to send a suite of 10 technology demonstrations and science investigations to the lunar surface in 2023.
