NASA Scraps $73M Moon Mission After Years of Delays

NASA has canceled its $73 million CP-12 lunar mission after delays pushed the planned far-side Moon landing well beyond its original schedule. The agency and Draper mutually agreed to terminate the contract under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program after years of redesign work on the lander.

The contract was signed in 2022, with launch initially targeted for 2025. But repeated changes to the spacecraft stretched the timeline so far that the landing was no longer expected until 2030–2031. By the time the deal ended, NASA had paid Draper $43 million for completed milestones.

The lander for the mission was being developed by ispace-U.S., the US subsidiary of Japan’s ispace. With NASA ending the main contract, ispace-U.S. also automatically lost its subcontract from Draper.

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In 2023, the lander had to be redesigned to meet NASA science payload requirements. Then, in 2025, developers changed the engine, later announced another propulsion swap, and moved to the unified Ultra platform that is meant to be used by both ispace’s Japanese and US divisions. After those changes, readiness for the CP-12 lander slipped to 2030.

The mission was supposed to deliver three scientific payloads to the far side of the Moon:

• Farside Seismic Suite (FSS), designed to record moonquakes in the Schrödinger basin
• Lunar Interior Temperature and Materials Suite, intended to measure heat flow and subsurface electrical conductivity
• Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Lite (LuSEE-Lite), built to study electric and magnetic fields on the lunar surface

NASA said it is not abandoning the CP-12 science program itself. Instead, the agency plans to fly the already built instruments on future CLPS lander missions tied to the Moon Base and Artemis lunar programs. That said, some recently ordered commercial landers are designed for the Moon’s near side, which means payloads such as the FSS seismic package would not be suitable for them.

This is not the first CLPS mission NASA has canceled before launch. In 2019, the agency ended a project with Orbit Beyond, and after Masten Space Systems went bankrupt in 2022, another commercial lunar landing contract was shut down.

For its part, ispace said it remains involved in the program and plans to compete for new CLPS 2.0 contracts covering later and more complex lunar missions.