FILE – This image provided by NASA, shows a selfie of their Perseverance Mars rover, on July 23, 2024. The image is made up of 62 individual images that were stitched together. (NASA via AP, file) During a news briefing about NASA’s latest moon exploration plans, according to Ars Technica, space agency head Jared Isaacman suggested the possibility of sending a spare nuclear-powered Mars rover — an engineering model of the Mars Perseverance rover — to the moon.
Such a proposal represents outside-the-box thinking for NASA, which is becoming more common under Isaacman’s leadership. Had someone proposed sending a car-sized nuclear rover to the moon in times past, NASA would have gone through its usual years-long, multibillion dollar process to make it happen. By one estimate, Mars Perseverance cost $2.7 billion, including launch costs and initial operations.
The rover in question is an engineering development version of Perseverance, now dubbed Promise, an acronym for Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration. It will take some refurbishing to make it able to trundle about the moon instead of Mars, but it likely can be done for far less than the cost of building an entirely new rover of a similar size and capability.
How will the Promise rover land on the moon? Perseverance relied on atmospheric slowing, first with a heat shield and then by parachute. The moon has no atmosphere to speak of. On the other hand, the moon has one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, while Mars has one-third.
Ars Technica suggests that either a SpaceX Starship or a Blue Origin New Glenn will be required to take the Promise rover from Earth to the lunar surface. A Starship Human Landing System can potentially take an immense amount of mass to the moon. Promise could be one payload among many for an uncrewed test of the Starship Human Landing System. New Glenn could deliver the Promise rover with a Blue Moon lander.
A nuclear-powered rover would have advantages at the lunar south pole that the regular, solar-powered versions lack. It could enter the permanently shadowed craters to prospect for ice and other resources. If the records of Perseverance and its predecessors Curiosity and Opportunity are any example, Promise could operate on the lunar surface for years and could range widely.
At the same time Isaacman noted the possibility of sending Promise to the moon, he also announced that four more missions under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program would be funded for late 2028. This program, which involves NASA partially funding commercial lunar landers, predates Isaacman’s tenure at NASA. It started in 2018 during the first Trump administration. It represents the same outside-the-box approach to space exploration that sending a spare nuclear-powered rover to the lunar service does. The space agency saves considerable money by not building and launching these lunar landers in-house.
Balanced against the cost savings is the fact that success of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions has been, thus far, spotty at best. Of the four attempted so far, only one, a Firefly Blue Ghost landing in March 2025, has been a complete success.
NASA awarded Astrobotic $297.9 million for two CLPS deliveries and awarded Firefly Aerospace $144.2 million and Intuitive Machines $148.3 million for one delivery each under the program.
NASA will fly the same suite of instruments on each of the landers, which includes a Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume Surface Studies, Laser Retroreflector Array and Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer. NASA is considering adding additional instruments on each of the missions and other providers, including commercial companies and academic organizations, will add instruments and payloads.
In the meantime, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tested artificial intelligence technology for future rovers. The ERNEST rover recently completed a 16-mile trek through the Southern California desert almost entirely autonomously.
Currently, rovers must be controlled by operators on Earth. That can be somewhat cumbersome for Mars, since signals can take up to 20 minutes to travel to the Red Planet to issue commands and up to 20 minutes back to provide data, including information on the rover’s status.
Even for lunar rovers, which can be controlled almost instantaneously, especially from a moon base, autonomous technology would be very useful. AI-controlled rovers would free humans from constantly having to supervise them so that they can perform other tasks.
New ways of acquiring robotic probes such as rovers and AI technology are changing the way humankind explores other worlds.
Mark R. Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?” as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?” He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
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