A single week in early March saw two commercial companies, Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace, land their respective spacecraft on the Moon’s surface to deliver scientific payloads on behalf of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which aims to facilitate rapid acquisition of lunar delivery services that both enable scientific exploration and commercial development of the Moon.

These sequential landings demonstrate not only the substantial progress made by commercial space companies since the CLPS program’s inception in 2018, but also highlights the role commercial partners will serve in a new “space race,” that carries both civil and national security implications.

In this episode of "The Elara Edge," Elara Nova partner Lt Gen (Ret) Bill Liquori breaks down the recent achievements of the CLPS program, as well as the civil and national security implications these achievements carry. Gen Liquori previously served as the first Deputy Chief of Space Operations for Strategy, Plans, Programs, and Analysis at the United States Space Force, and currently serves on several space-related advisory boards - including the Space Force Association, True Anomaly, and Intuitive Machines.

"The Elara Edge" is hosted by Scott King and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. The full story can be found on Elara Nova's Insights page here. Music was produced by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio.