NASA intends to begin buying rides on commercial lunar landers by the end of the year, Space News reported referring to NASA deputy associate administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate, James Reuter.

According to him, NASA has “a strong push to get a lander service to the Moon as quickly as possible. We think the capability is there in industry for us to do that. To make this work as a commercial service, we want to be a primary customer, but not the only customer. That will be part of our decision-making. We are nominally thinking we will sponsor at least one flight a year.”

“We are thinking that if we go straight to a human-size lander now and impose the requirements that we typically impose on human-rated vehicles, we would probably develop something too unwieldy. Our goal is start with a mid-size lander, something 500 to 1,000 kilograms, and let industry develop that based on their standards to be highly reliable,” James Reuter added.