Which companies are building lunar landers?

Q: Which companies are building lunar landers?

Commercial lunar landers are being built by Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, ispace, Draper, and (for crewed missions) SpaceX and Blue Origin. Most of the robotic landers are flown under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program; the crewed Human Landing System (HLS) contracts went to SpaceX Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon.

Lunar landers split into three groups: commercial robotic landers (CLPS), crewed landers (HLS), and national-program landers. The list of operators in 2026 is short (landing on the Moon is hard), but it has grown meaningfully since the late 2010s.

CLPS: commercial robotic landers

NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is the main demand source. Multiple providers compete for individual task orders, each landing science and technology payloads:

Intuitive Machines: Nova-C class lander (IM-1 landed 2024; IM-2, IM-3 in flow)
Astrobotic Technology: Peregrine (lost), Griffin (in development, including VIPER-class rovers)
Firefly Aerospace: Blue Ghost lander (Blue Ghost 1 launched 2025)
Draper: leading a team for SERIES-2 polar lander
ispace: Tokyo-based; HAKUTO-R series, M1 lost, M2 launched 2025

HLS: crewed lunar landers

NASA selected two providers under the Artemis Human Landing System program:

SpaceX: Starship HLS, the variant of Starship that will land astronauts on the Artemis III and IV missions
Blue Origin: Blue Moon MK2, a lander developed with a team including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Draper, and Honeybee Robotics

National-program landers

State actors fly their own missions alongside commercial work:

China (CNSA): Chang’e program, with Chang’e 6 returning farside samples in 2024
India (ISRO): Chandrayaan-3 successfully landed at the south pole in 2023; Chandrayaan-4 / 5 in planning
JAXA: SLIM smart-lander mission (2024)
Roscosmos: Luna-25 (lost 2023)
ESA: partnering with NASA on Artemis; Argonaut large-logistics lander in development

What makes lunar landing hard

A few things tend to bite:

The Moon has no atmosphere, so all braking is propulsive. Engines must throttle deeply and reliably
Sun-angle and shadow at the south pole are unforgiving on optical navigation
Terminal landing requires precise hazard detection: boulders and craters near scientifically interesting sites
Communications latency through Earth or via a relay satellite limits real-time override

For the live list of companies tagged with lunar work, see /tags/lunar.