From CLPS to Mars: NASA’s test of commercial deep space

If you want to understand how deep space exploration is changing, don’t start at Mars. First, let’s take a look at the Moon. 

In February 2024, a small hexagonal lander called Odysseus tipped onto the lunar surface at a 30 degree angle and made history: the first US soft landing since Apollo, and the first ever by a private company, under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Just a month earlier, another CLPS spacecraft, Peregrine, had sprung a propellant leak and lost any chance of landing softly.

Success and failure, back-to-back. But from NASA’s point of view, CLPS was never meant to be perfect; the goal was to prove you could buy lunar access as a service, instead of building every mission from scratch.

And now NASA is asking if the same thing could be possible for Mars. 

Small steps towards space industry overhaul 

On 1 May 2024, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that nine US companies had been selected to carry out 12 concept studies under what it calls Mars Exploration Commercial Services. Each company received between USD $200,000 and $300,000 for a 12 week study, exploring how commercial services could support science missions to Mars.

It was a pretty radical brief; because it tested the theory that instead of NASA designing a one-off spacecraft for every mission, it could buy services (payload delivery, imaging, communications) from a commercial ecosystem. 

The studies fell into four categories:

1. Small payload delivery and hosting – Lockheed Martin, Impulse Space and Firefly Aerospace were selected to adapt vehicles (lunar exploration spacecraft or Earth-vicinity ‘space tug’ orbital transfer vehicles) for small-payload delivery and hosting at Mars.
2. Large payload delivery and hosting – United Launch Alliance (ULA), Blue Origin and Astrobotic were selected to explore modifying upper stages or lunar-derived spacecraft to carry an aggregate customer mass of ≈ 1,250 kg to Mars orbit.
3. Mars surface imaging services – Albedo Space Corporation, Redwire Space and Astrobotic were selected to adapt Earth-orbit imaging spacecraft for Mars, including higher resolution surface imaging platforms.
4. Next generation relay services – SpaceX, Lockheed Martin and Blue Origin were selected to explore communications relay/telecom services for Mars, starting from adaptation of Earth-orbit communications assets.

NASA is careful to frame these as studies only, noting that they “could potentially lead to future requests for proposals but do not constitute a NASA commitment.” But all the same, they could form part of an early sketch for a CLPS-for-Mars model. 

Why now? Budget pressure, commercial capability, and a crowded sky

First, the space economy is already mostly commercial. The global space economy reached $613 billion in 2024, according to the Space Foundation; and commercial activity accounted for approximately 78% of that total. A study by McKinsey and WEF suggests it could grow to $1.8 trillion by 2035, implying annual growth of roughly 9%.

Second, government budgets are under pressure. NASA’s flagship Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission has been through a very public reckoning, with an independent review warning total costs could reach $8 - 11 billion and push the sample return date toward 2040. 

That kind of number can crowd out other priorities; perhaps contributing to the reasons why NASA is asking industry for cheaper architectures and fixed price studies.

And third, there is a proven policy precedent in CLPS. On the Moon, NASA already buys delivery as a service, with commercial companies taking on more technical and financial risk in exchange for greater freedom to sell to non-NASA customers. CLPS has delivered both painful failures (like Peregrine’s propellant leak and mission loss) and high profile successes, like Odysseus’ landing.

In that context, Mars commercial services are not an oddity. They’re the next logical testbed: can we extend the service procurement model beyond low Earth orbit and the Moon, into the harsher economics of the Red Planet?

Where could value concentrate in a Mars services stack? 

If you strip away the sci-fi romanticisation, the NASA studies are probing three layers of a potential Mars services stack:

1. Transport as a service. Small and large-payload delivery concepts are focused on standardised ports and buses – think of them as Mars rideshare platforms. The focus on adapting existing vehicles (tugs like Elytra, Griffin landers, Centaur upper stages) suggests early contracts will favour heritage plus increment over clean-sheet designs.
2. Data as a service Imaging and relay concepts target both spatial resolution (down to about 0.3-1 m) and data rate (≥4 Mb/s at 1.5 AU). High-volume imaging and science data could become a subscription-like product for science teams, agencies, and eventually commercial users (for example in-situ resource scouting).
3. Infrastructure as a platform SpaceX’s Marslink idea (a constellation derived from Starlink designs) and Blue Origin’s Blue Ring-based relay tug are essentially bids to own the communications backbone for Mars. Whoever controls that backbone controls a tollbooth on future traffic (rovers, landers, even crewed missions). 

So for space startups and investors right now, the headline here isn’t those few million dollars of study funding; it’s the option value embedded in becoming the default provider if NASA (and other agencies) decide to buy services instead of hardware. 

Hold on – what about the outcomes of those NASA studies? 

The studies were set to conclude in August 2024, but so far we haven’t been able to find any publicly available data on the results. 

NASA’s Mars Exploration Program (MEP) website does confirm that a community update was held on 4 December 2024 – which suggests the results were being reviewed and discussed.

For now, we’re watching for a fuller public summary or follow-on procurement decisions.

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Mars may still be a distant horizon; but today’s chapter in the exploration story is being written closer to home, through investments, partnerships, and brave innovation.