NASA terminates Draper lunar lander mission

WASHINGTON — NASA and Draper have terminated plans for a lunar lander mission after significant delays in development of the spacecraft. NASA and Draper have mutually agreed to terminate a task order awarded to Draper in July 2022 as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS. The task order, designated CP-12, was valued at $73 million. The termination was revealed by ispace, the Japanese lunar lander developer whose American subsidiary, ispace-U.S., was a subcontractor to Draper for the mission. In a statement issued late July 14, ispace said that because the CLPS task order was being terminated, its contract with Draper to provide the lander would also be canceled. A spokesperson for Draper confirmed to SpaceNews on July 15 that it was terminating its task order but referred questions about the decision to NASA. NASA said in a July 17 response to questions submitted July 15 that it ended the CP-12 task order with Draper “due to delays associated with the lander redesign” for the mission. “Future milestones were projected to take years to complete, leading to a landing date in 2030 or 2031,” the agency stated. Of the original value of $73 million for the task order, NASA said $43 million had been paid to Draper to date for successfully completing milestones. When the agency awarded the CP-12 task order, the lander was scheduled to launch in 2025. The launch slipped to 2026 when ispace-U.S. revised the design of the lander in 2023 to accommodate the needs of the NASA payloads and then to 2027 when ispace-U.S. changed the engine used in the lander in May 2025. In March, ispace announced it was again changing engines as well as merging the separate lunar lander designs of its American and Japanese business units into a single design called Ultra. The lander being developed by ispace-U.S. for Draper was delayed to 2030, after two missions of the Ultra design built by ispace in Japan. The mission was to send a lander to the far side of the moon with three experiments. The Farside Seismic Suite, or FSS, features seismometers to measure seismic activity in the moon’s Schrödinger Basin. The Lunar Interior Temperature and Materials Suite would measure heat flow and electrical conductivity below the surface. The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Lite, or LuSEE-Lite, would measure electrical and magnetic fields. “The agency remains committed to the science objectives of the CP-12 science payloads and will work to deliver these already-developed instruments to the moon at the earliest opportunity through future CLPS landings as part of the increased tempo of lunar activity by our Moon Base and Artemis programs,” the agency stated. NASA awarded four lunar lander missions June 30 to Astrobotic (now Voyager Lunar Systems), Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines that may be able to accommodate additional payloads. However, at least some of the lander missions are going to the near side of the moon and thus would not be able to host…