Astrolab

FLEX is roughly the size of a small pickup truck and built to carry up to 1,500 kilograms of cargo across about 5,000 kilometres of lunar surface over a ten-year life. Its most deliberate feature is the payload interface, which lets the rover drive up to a cargo pallet, lift it and set it down somewhere else with nobody aboard. The intent is for the rover to be infrastructure rather than an instrument: other people's hardware plugs into it, and Astrolab sells the driving.

Jaret Matthews came from JPL and SpaceX and started the company on the observation that every planetary rover before it had been a bespoke science instrument, built once, for one mission. Sustained lunar operations need something closer to a truck, moving crew one day and cargo the next. The team built a full-scale drivable FLEX and tested it with people aboard within about two years, a faster physical demonstration than most of this cohort managed.

Nothing has left Earth. FLIP, the precursor rover, is built and thermal-vacuum tested with four NASA payloads aboard, but it rides Astrobotic's Griffin-1, which has slipped from the end of 2025 to the middle of 2026 to late 2026, and whose predecessor crashed on the Moon. The commercial FLEX delivery depends on Starship performing a lunar cargo landing, which is not close. The $219 million NASA task order won in May 2026 is real money and a genuine win, but it also records a downgrade: NASA's restructured lunar programme asked for smaller, less capable rovers sooner, so the contracted vehicle carries 950 kilograms in total and drives about 200 kilometres, against the two-tonne, 5,000-kilometre machine Astrolab has been showing since 2022. The flagship is now something the company funds itself.