NASA handed Stone Aerospace a $175,000 check in July 2026 to fund a nine-month research on a hovering robot that would have the opportunity to explore one of the Moon’s most intriguing features. The proposal is named the Lunar Underground eXplorer (LUX), and it is based on power-over-fiber technology.
NASA picked Lunar Outpost to deliver a new crewed rover called Pegasus for the Artemis program. Astronauts will drive it across the lunar south pole starting around 2028. The vehicle brings a clear step up in what crews can accomplish during surface operations. It offers the range, endurance, and flexibility needed to support longer stays and the groundwork for a permanent outpost.
NASA has awarded Intuitive Machines a $180.4 million contract to deliver seven science payloads to a carefully chosen site near the lunar south pole. The Houston based company will use one of its larger lander configurations for the mission, designated IM-5, with a target landing date of around 2030 at Mons Malapert. The location was selected for good reason. The ridge maintains fairly consistent line of sight with Earth, receives relatively steady sunlight, and sits close to permanently shadowed regions that may hold water ice, a resource that could prove critical to sustaining long term human operations on the Moon.
The sun shines a spotlight on the steep face of an unnamed crater. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) took this photo on August 30, 2023. This spacecraft has been orbiting the moon since 2009, continuously collecting photographs of its surface using its cameras. When the camera started rolling, the orbiter was floating about 100 kilometers above the moon’s surface, with the sun’s rays coming in at an angle of 82 degrees from the right.
A California startup has just begun accepting reservations for the world’s first hotel on the Moon, and the prices aren’t cheap. A deposit of ranging from $250,000 to $1 million will secure your seat in a project that won’t begin until 2032. Galactic Resource Utilization Space, also known as GRU Space, began the booking process in mid-January 2026.
Fifty years after astronauts bounced around the lunar surface in a stripped-down electric cart, General Motors is back with a rover that’s more like a reliable pickup truck than a one-time toy. The Lunar Terrain Vehicle, or LTV, is developed by a team led by Lunar Outpost, with General Motors handling the battery pack, frame and smarts for standing upright on uneven ground. This vehicle is for NASA’s Artemis missions which will deliver humans to the South Pole starting around 2030.
NASA’s latest lunar venture sounds like a science fiction novel, but it’s real. The Fission Surface Power Project, a multi-year effort to put a nuclear reactor on the Moon, has just completed its first phase. Detailed in a recent NASA release, it lays the groundwork for a small nuclear powered generator that can power habitats, rovers and experiments even during the Moon’s 2 week long nights.
Photo credit: Vladimir Vustyansky
NASA has a bold plan to plant a massive radio telescope in a lunar crater, a project that could redefine how we listen to the universe’s deepest secrets. Dubbed the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT), this isn’t just another space gadget—it’s a 1-kilometer-wide wire mesh dish designed to capture whispers from the cosmos that Earth’s noisy atmosphere and satellites drown out. If approved, it could be operational by the 2030s, built entirely by robots in a pristine, radio-quiet zone on the moon’s far side.
Photo credit: ESA/M. Cowan
Half a century ago, the world watched Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon through grainy, black-and-white footage that felt like a transmission from another era. Today, as humanity gears up for a new wave of lunar exploration with NASA’s Artemis program, the visuals promise to be nothing short of spectacular. High-definition video, vibrant colors, and smooth 60-frames-per-second streams are set to replace the fuzzy images of the Apollo days. But capturing these cinematic moments on the Moon’s harsh, dusty surface is no small feat. At the European Space Agency’s LUNA facility in Cologne, Germany, astronauts and engineers are rehearsing every detail, from snapping selfies in spacesuits to filming dynamic lunar walks, ensuring the next Moon landing is a visual masterpiece.
Bridgestone is getting ready to unveil two new prototypes of their second-generation lunar rover tires at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) booth during the 40th Space Symposium. These tires are designed for small and medium-sized rovers, and they’re lighter than the ones they revealed last year. The updates are all about making them work better on the Moon, where it’s super hot or cold, there’s no air, and the ground is covered in fine, scratchy dust called regolith.