NASA taps 2 companies to develop buggies for its moon base program

CBS Evening News NASA taps 2 companies to develop buggies for its moon base program .chip { background-image: url('/fly/bundles/cbsnewscore/images/chip-bgd/chip-bgd-evening-news.jpg'); } By Kris Van Cleave Kris Van Cleave Kris Van Cleave Emmy Award-winning journalist Kris Van Cleave is the senior transportation correspondent for CBS News based in Phoenix, Arizona, where he also serves as a national correspondent reporting for all CBS News broadcasts and platforms. Read Full Bio Kris Van Cleave May 30, 2026 / 8:31 PM EDT / CBS News Add CBS News on Google Hawthorne, California — It was 1971 when America's love affair with the car went lunar. The Apollo Lunar Rover turned American moon-walkers into moon-drivers, allowing astronauts to explore more than 50 miles of lunar crust and craters."The Apollo Lunar Rover was a phenomenal machine, but fundamentally it had a very different job to do than the one we're doing," Jaret Matthews, CEO and founder of Astrolab, told CBS News.On a back street in Hawthorne, California, Matthews took CBS News for a spin in a Zamboni-looking prototype of his company's 21st-century lunar rover, which it calls FLEX.The final design for NASA will look like a four-wheel drive electric vehicle that can either rove on its own or carry two astronauts and supplies.It will be designed to operate for a year, traversing hundreds of miles across the lunar terrain."The lunar terrain vehicles have to be a mash-up of the Apollo Lunar Rover to carry two suited astronauts, as well as something more modern like the Perseverance Rover on Mars, and can be operated remotely from Earth," Matthews said.Astrolab is one of two companies NASA picked to build the first moon buggies for the moon base it plans to spend the next seven years developing near the lunar south pole. NASA also tapped Colorado-based Lunar Outpost to build a moon buggy called Pegasus. NASA is paying Astrolab and Lunar Outpost about $220 million each for the pro...