NASA plans new Moon rover mission

A Colorado-based company, Lunar Outpost, announced that it is participating in NASA's Artemis program's goal of establishing permanent lunar bases, Space.com reported.

The company has already built a lunar rover called Eagle and sent a robotic mini-rover to the Moon with a commercial lunar lander. In addition, this month, the company announced that it has secured $30 million in funding to help it develop a new, smaller rover, called Pegasus, CE Report quotes AGERPRES.

Conceptual illustrations shared by the company reveal that Pegasus is a simpler offering than the larger, SUV-like Eagle rover. Pegasus resembles NASA's "moon buggy" used during the Apollo missions. The company hopes to have the new Pegasus rover delivered by the end of 2027, with a launch to the Moon in 2028, a timeline that matches NASA's latest Artemis 4 timeline.

Lunar Outpost already has more lunar rovers assigned to missions than all other commercial companies combined. But rovers aren't the only lunar technologies the company is researching and developing.

The company aims to develop an entire infrastructure ecosystem on the Moon, as well as the robots that will build it.

"We're a lunar infrastructure company, and the infrastructure of the lunar base won't just be built by astronauts," the company's vice president of strategy, Michael Moreno, told Space.com. "It's going to be an autonomous robotic workforce, and that's our expertise," he said.

Space.com spoke with Moreno in April 2026 at the Space Foundation's annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs about Lunar Outpost's vision for autonomous technologies that will work alongside astronauts to build the infrastructure needed for a sustained human presence on the Moon.

"We have rovers that will do autonomous infrastructure construction, lunar surface preparation, help build launch and landing platforms, energy storage and habitats," Moreno said.

Lunar Outpost's first robotic mini-rover, the Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (MAPP), never got to explore the moon because its vehicle, the Intuitive Machines Athena lunar module, overturned during the March 2025 landing.

But Lunar Outpost already has four more MAPP missions in the works, Moreno said, including one as part of NASA's Artemis 4, which will mark humanity's return to the lunar surface if all goes according to plan.

"We're pairing a MAPP rover with an Artemis astronaut on Artemis 4," Moreno said. "It will be the first time in history that we've had an astronaut working alongside a rover."

Lunar Outposts is planning to have one of its MAPP rovers travel alongside Artemis astronauts, studying the properties of the lunar surface.

"They'll work together to characterize the lunar regolith and understand some of the properties of the regolith to help us with both of those science goals, paving the way for future exploration," Moreno said.

There's a lot of money at stake in the design and development of the next lunar rover. NASA's new round of lunar rover contracts totals $4.6 billion through 2039.

But Lunar Outpost's efforts to build infrastructure on the moon aren't just about the next big economic boom, the company says. According to Moreno, Lunar Outpost is inspired by a much larger vision of helping humanity colonize other planets.

"We've wanted to go back to the moon for 50 years, and I think it's a human imperative," he said. "Beyond that, it's the launch pad for deep space exploration. It's how we start to make humans a multi-planet species.

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