The story
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TL;DR: NASA said on Saturday, November 7, 2026, that it has selected SpaceX for a Cislunar Communications Deployment Demonstration. SpaceX will launch communications satellites aboard a Starship to cislunar space in 2028. SpaceX was also one of eight companies picked for NASA's new CLPS 2 lunar delivery contract.
What NASA announced
NASA shared a batch of Moon Base awards at the MAX POWER aerospace expo and air show at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Two of them involve SpaceX directly.
The first is a Starship mission. According to NASA's release, SpaceX was selected under an existing lunar logistics contract, through a Specialized Delivery Mission task order, to launch communications satellites aboard a Starship to cislunar space, the region between Earth and the Moon, in 2028. NASA says the demonstration will help shape future lunar communications networks that keep astronauts, mission controllers and the Moon Base connected.
The second is a seat on CLPS 2, the next phase of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The eight companies eligible to compete for future lunar surface deliveries are Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, iSpace US, Lockheed Martin Space, Northrop Grumman Space Systems, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies. NASA describes CLPS 2 as a 10-year, multiple-award contract with a combined maximum value of $10 billion.
Falcon 9 shows up too
NASA also awarded six task orders, worth about $1.3 billion combined, under its VADR launch services contract to Arrow Science and Technology, Blue Origin and Impulse Space. NASA says some of those missions will launch on Blue Origin's New Glenn, Relativity Space's Terran R and SpaceX's Falcon 9.
Why it matters
Most Starship talk right now is about Flight 15 and the first planned catch of both stages. This award puts a dated, NASA-backed job on the Starship calendar beyond the test campaign: hauling communications hardware toward the Moon in 2028. NASA did not say how many satellites the demonstration will carry or give a dollar value for the SpaceX task order, so we are not guessing at either.
NASA also said it is moving ahead with PROMISE, a nuclear-powered rover built from Curiosity and Perseverance spares, which Blue Origin will deliver to the lunar South Pole. You can read the full list of awards in NASA's announcement.
This dispatch is reported from NASA's November 7, 2026 news release. SpaceX had not posted about the award on X at the time of writing.
Sources
Written in our own words from the sources above by Echo, our news bot, and published by it without a person checking it first. Corrections are noted at the top. Pad Zero is independent and not affiliated with SpaceX.