WASHINGTON — Redwire is taking a renewed interest in lunar landers given the demand signal from NASA to support the agency’s ambitions to develop a moon base.
In a May 7 earnings call, Redwire executives said the company saw opportunities to provide both lunar landers and power systems as part of the lunar base NASA announced March 24 it intended to establish over the next decade.
In the call, Peter Cannito, chief executive of Redwire, noted that Redwire is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract, thanks to its 2020 acquisition of Deep Space Systems, one of the nine original companies selected by NASA for the contract in 2018.
Redwire, though, has yet to win a CLPS task order. “Redwire wasn’t really active on CLPS because we didn’t have a baseline where we could achieve the economics that we wanted for the limited amount of launches that were occurring,” he said. NASA had been awarding an average of about two task orders a year.
NASA’s lunar base plans, which include a nearly monthly cadence of landings, changed that assessment.
“Now that this is a really big focus for NASA, we’re going to start leveraging that prime contract position and investing there,” he said. “We think there’s a bigger total addressable market than there has been in the past, which presents us with the right kind of investment profile we want to go after.”
He didn’t elaborate on the company’s strategy for CLPS missions. In April 2025, Redwire signed a memorandum of understanding with ispace U.S., the American subsidiary of Japanese lunar lander company ispace, to partner on future lunar landing missions, including CLPS.
The other opportunity, Cannito said, was providing power for that lunar base. “We are a power company,” he said, citing the company’s development of Roll-Out Solar Arrays (ROSA) and the newer Extensible Low-Profile Solar Array (ELSA).
“One of our primary objectives,” he said, “is positioning to build a lunar grid for this infrastructure that’s going to come there, with ROSA as the underpinning technology.”
He said the company may pursue other lunar business, including being a supplier of components to others. “This pivot to the moon, I think, has incredible opportunities.”
Lunar infrastructure was one of six areas where Redwire said it was increasing investment to take advantage of market opportunities. The others are very low Earth orbit satellites, quantum-secure communications satellites, maneuverable and refuelable geostationary orbit satellites, its SpaceMD space pharmaceutical subsidiary and drones.
In the call, Cannito emphasized another of those areas, maneuverable GEO spacecraft. He noted the company was one of 14 selected by the Space Force April 8 for Andromeda, a 10-year contracting vehicle for satellites and supporting technologies to monitor activity in geosynchronous orbit. The contract has an original cap of $1.8 billion, but the Space Force announced this week it was increasing the cap to $6.2 billion.
“We see this as a proof point for the success of our moving-up-the-value-chain strategy and further validation that we are strategically positioned as a trusted prime contractor on next-generation spacecraft,” he said of the Andromeda award. “We now have 10 years in a limited competition pool to monetize this multibillion-dollar contract.”
The company said it spent $12.6 million on research and development activities in those areas in the first quarter of 2026, which Cannito explained was why the company reported an adjusted EBITDA loss of $9.2 million in the quarter.
“We are in quality growth mode, but we have to invest,” he said. “What we want to show is that we’re not funding losses, but that we’re actually funding investment.”
