The Mechanism
Washington does not need to fund a new moon program to move money into lunar stocks. It already has one running. NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is a standing indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract pool with a cumulative ceiling of $2.6 billion through 2028. Fourteen pre-qualified vendors sit on the IDIQ, and NASA issues task orders — competitive, real money — whenever the White House signals lunar priority in a budget request or a policy directive. The FY 2026 budget, even after a proposed 24 percent haircut to the broader NASA envelope, still earmarks the bulk of the Human Space Exploration line for lunar activity. Every time a task order drops, one or two companies walk away with nine figures of firm-fixed-price work. Intuitive Machines has walked away with six of them.