Impulse Space Wins Two NASA Task Orders for Moon Base Missions

Impulse Space announced on November 7, 2026 that it had received two firm-fixed-price NASA task orders for Moon Base missions scheduled to begin in 2028. The awards cover work extending from launch through cislunar payload delivery and a test of upsized cargo delivery to the lunar surface. Their individual and combined values were not disclosed.

Impulse will serve as prime contractor for both orders, which collectively provide access to its entire product fleet: the Helios kick stage, Mira maneuvering spacecraft and highly throttleable lander for cislunar and lunar-surface cargo deliveries. Impulse characterized the selections as among the first awards supporting the Moon Base program.

Both orders sit within NASA’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare launch services contract, or VADR, under the agency’s Commercial Access to Space Program. NASA’s VADR overview describes an approach intended to lower launch costs for risk-tolerant science and technology payloads through less agency oversight and greater flexibility in commercial mission management. NASA’s Launch Services Program manages the contract, and the agency issues firm-fixed-price task orders as needed.

VADR’s fixed-price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts have a five-year ordering period and a maximum total value of $300 million across all contracts. That ceiling applies to the broader procurement framework, not specifically to Impulse’s two awards, and does not establish their commercial value.

Two Task Orders Cover Different Mission Profiles

Under the first order, SpaceX’s (SPCX ) Falcon 9 will launch a NASA payload. The work also includes an option for Mira vehicles to deliver alternative payloads to cislunar space, where Mira can support payload deployments and hosting.

The second order uses Relativity’s Terran R to carry Impulse’s vehicles to orbit before Impulse transports NASA’s payloads onward. That launch will carry Helios and Impulse’s lunar lander. Helios will operate as a kick stage, while the lander deploys NASA payloads into their target cislunar orbits. After those deployments, the lander will perform a descent profile to test upsized cargo delivery to the lunar surface. The sequence therefore adds a surface-delivery demonstration to the orbital transfer and deployment work.

From Feasibility Studies To Mission Responsibilities

The awards build on two orbital transfer vehicle service studies announced on August 8, 2025. NASA’s Launch Services Program selected Impulse through VADR to examine lower-cost commercial ways to deliver spacecraft to difficult-to-access destinations. Those studies considered how Mira and Helios could deploy multiple payloads to different destinations on one launch, or enable a single payload to reach destinations beyond the reach of current launch services. The new orders assign specific mission roles to those vehicles rather than simply examining their potential uses.

Moon Base is designed to develop a permanent lunar outpost and support an enduring human presence near the Moon’s South Pole through crewed and uncrewed missions. Founder and CEO Tom Mueller connected that objective to Impulse’s business: “NASA’s Moon Base is exactly the type of sustained in-space logistics challenge that Impulse was founded to solve,” he said.

The undisclosed values leave the financial scale of the work unclear, but the operational commitments are specific. Impulse will coordinate launch partners and its own transfer and landing vehicles across cislunar deployment and a surface-cargo test. That moves its NASA work from feasibility studies into defined responsibilities within the transportation infrastructure intended to support a sustained lunar presence.