NASA is going to rent some cool wheels to drive around the moon.
Space agency officials announced Wednesday that they have hired three companies to develop preliminary designs for vehicles that will carry NASA astronauts around the lunar south polar region in the coming years. After the astronauts return to Earth, these vehicles will be able to drive themselves as robotic explorers, similar to NASA’s rovers on Mars.
Self-driving capability will also allow the vehicle to meet the astronaut’s next mission in a different location.
“Where it’s going, there are no roads,” Jacob Bleacher, NASA’s chief exploration scientist, said at a news conference Wednesday. “Its mobility will fundamentally change how we view the moon.”
The companies are Intuitive Machines of Houston, which in February successfully landed a robotic spacecraft on the moon; Lunar Outpost of Golden, Colo.; and Venturi Astrolab of Hawthorne, Calif. Only one of the three will actually build a vehicle for NASA and send it to the moon.
NASA has solicited proposals for what it calls a lunar terrain vehicle, or LTV, which could drive at speeds of up to 9.3 miles per hour, travel a dozen miles on a single charge and allow astronauts to drive for eight hours.
The agency will work with the three companies for a year to further develop their designs. NASA will then select one of them for the demonstration phase.
The LTV will not be ready in time for the Artemis III astronauts, the first landing in NASA’s return-to-the-moon program, currently scheduled for 2026.
The plan is for LTV to be on the lunar surface ahead of Artemis V, the third astronaut landing expected in the 2030s, said Lara Kearney, manager of the extravehicular activity and human surface mobility program at NASA Johnson Space Center.
“If they get there sooner, we’ll get it sooner,” said Ms. Kearney.
The LTV contract is worth up to $4.6 billion over the next 15 years — five years of development and then a decade of lunar operations, most of which will go to the winner of this competition. But said Ms. Kearney said the contracts allow NASA to finance the development of additional rovers, or allow other companies to compete in the future.
The contract follows NASA’s recent strategy of buying services rather than hardware.
In the past, NASA paid aerospace companies to build vehicles that it then owned and operated. These include the Saturn V rocket, the space shuttles and the lunar vehicles — known as moon buggies — that astronauts drove to the moon on the last three Apollo missions in 1971 and 1972.
The new approach has proven successful and cheaper for transporting cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. NASA now pays companies, notably Elon Musk’s SpaceX, fixed fees for those services, more akin to plane tickets or FedEx shipments.
For the company that chooses to build the LTV, the vehicle will remain its property, and that company will be able to rent it out to other customers when NASA doesn’t need it.
“It’s commercially viable for us as a commercial enterprise to sell capacity on that rover,” said Steve Altemus, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines, “and do that for international partners and for others commercial companies and space agencies around the world.”
The competition has created alliances between small startups and larger aerospace companies, as well as car companies. The Intuitive Machines team includes Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Michelin, the tire maker. The Lunar Outpost added to its team of Lockheed Martin, Goodyear and General Motors, which helped design the Apollo moon buggies.
Astrolab works with Houston’s Axiom Space, which has sent private astronauts to the space station and is building a commercial module on the International Space Station. Astrolab announced last year that it had signed an agreement to send one of its rovers to the moon on a SpaceX Starship rocket in 2026. That mission is independent of whether it is selected by NASA, a company spokesman said.
While Lunar Outpost is competing with Intuitive Machines on this contract, it plans to work with the company separately, sending smaller robotic rovers to the moon on the company’s lunar landers.
