Masten Space Systems

David Masten founded Masten Space Systems in 2004, eventually basing it at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. While most of the industry was focused on getting to orbit, Masten bet on the harder, less glamorous problem of bringing rockets back down precisely and reusably. Through the late 2000s its small team flew a family of vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing test vehicles, most notably the Xombie (XA-0.1B), proving controlled, propulsive, pinpoint landings years before they became routine.

Masten's defining moment came in 2009 at NASA's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, a Centennial Challenges competition to demonstrate lander-class VTVL flight. Its Xombie vehicle took the $150,000 Level 1 second prize in October 2009, and its larger Xoie (XA-0.1E) won the $1 million Level 2 grand prize on October 30, 2009, edging out rival Armadillo Aerospace on landing accuracy. The wins established Masten as a serious, low-cost VTVL pioneer and a credible test-flight provider for NASA and other customers.

Masten parlayed its reputation into a Moon contract. On April 8, 2020, NASA selected Masten under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, awarding a fixed-price task order, initially about $75.9 million and later modified upward, to build, launch, land and operate its XL-1 lander (Masten Mission 1) carrying NASA payloads to the lunar south pole near Haworth Crater. It was the kind of contract that can make a small company, but its fixed price left little room for the cost growth and schedule slips ahead. In June 2022 Masten slipped the mission from December 2022 to November 2023, blaming COVID-19 and supply-chain disruption.