The newest addition to NASA’s vendor pool of lunar lander developers, ispace-U.S., is ready to compete for future work, according to CEO Elizabeth Kryst.
The Colorado-based U.S. subsidiary of Japan-based ispace was among the eight companies NASA on Saturday said it had selected to compete to ferry payloads to the lunar surface under the second phase of the CLPS program, short for Commercial Lunar Payload Services. The other seven companies — Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SpaceX and Voyager Technologies — are also vendors for the first phase of CLPS, under which four lunar landers have been launched since 2024.
NASA plans to award up to $10 billion in CLPS 2 task orders to support development of its Moon Base, as the agency also works to return humans to the lunar surface under the Artemis program.
Ispace-U.S. has yet to launch a lander. Its parent company launched two landers in 2023 and 2025 for the HAKUTO missions; both experienced technical issues during their descent toward the moon that caused them to crash.
“We’re investing a lot and we’ve done everything we can within our control to make sure that we land softly on the moon next time,” Kryst said in an interview on the sidelines of NASA’s MAX POWER event over the weekend. “We have world-renowned experts studying our landings, how regolith plumes are created when the engines are touching down and other factors.”
For the CLPS 2 missions, she said ispace will propose its ULTRA lander, a design currently in development and testing. ULTRA was created by merging the previous lander model used for the HAKUTO missions with the APEX lander ispace-U.S. was previously developing.
Ispace is still working through evaluations and investigation of the two crashes, she said. The company in 2025 “stood up what we call an independent standing review board (ISRB), an organization that’s outside the company and chaired by Alan Stern, principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto,” Kryst said. The company at the time said the board’s purpose was to “enhance” future mission success.
All of ispace’s missions are fully autonomous, she noted. “Currently, we’re trying to build a base on the moon without a human in the loop, and there’s so much we just don’t know about the moon, such as these permanently shadowed regions, which creates lighting constraints.”
In parallel, ispace is also developing a set of five lunar communications satellites called Lunar Connect, the first of which is planned to launch in 2027, Kryst said.
