The market for sending spacecraft to the moon would seem to be a competitive one. NASA continues to drive the most demand for commercial lunar landers through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, with as much as $2.6 billion in contracts over 10 years. Every lunar lander mission by an American company launched to date had CLPS as the primary, if not only, customer.

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Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. He earned a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science...