Griffin

Mission specifications

Operator

Astrobotic

Prime contractor

Astrobotic

Launch

2026-07 (NET)

Landing site

Lunar south pole region

Customer

NASA-CLPS

Payload

Venturi Astrolab FLIP rover + mass-simulator + secondary payloadsas of 2026-05-28^[1]Original VIPER manifest cancelled by NASA July 2024; CLPS task order retained for lander demo

Contract value

$199.5Mas of 2020-06-11^[2]CLPS Task Order 19D; VIPER payload value modified after VIPER cancellation

Key findings

• 1.Aims to deliver Venturi Astrolab's FLIP (FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform) rover to the lunar south pole in the Nobile Crater region near Mons Mouton, launching on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center LC-39A. The launch window opens no earlier than July 2026, though Astrobotic's own most recent public framing lists the mission as NET November 2026.
• 2.Will fly a mixed manifest after NASA cancelled the VIPER payload in July 2024: alongside FLIP it is set to carry Astrobotic's own small (2U-class) CubeRover for a mobility demonstration and Nanofiche's Galactic Library cultural archive, plus additional secondary payloads. (Reports of an ESA LandCam-X camera or a children's-messages plaque are not confirmed by Astrobotic or primary manifest sources and are omitted here.)
• 3.Intends to demonstrate core Astrobotic and Astrolab technologies — telerobotic operations, lunar surface mobility and rover egress, solar power generation, thermal resilience, and precision autonomous landing using Terrain Relative Navigation and Hazard Detection & Avoidance.
• 4.Astrobotic reports pre-flight progress toward these goals — flight avionics assembled and accepted, closed-loop descent-and-landing simulations run in its LunaRay software, and FLIP mobility/egress testing — with the integrated lander bound for environmental qualification testing; the mission has not yet launched.
• 5.Operates under a CLPS task order (order 19D, originally valued near $199.5M for VIPER delivery and modified after VIPER's cancellation) retained by Astrobotic as a lander demonstration rather than a NASA science-rover delivery.

Mission outcome

Griffin Mission 1 is Astrobotic's first flight of its large Griffin lander and remains in development, targeting a launch window that opens no earlier than July 2026 on a Falcon Heavy toward the Moon's south pole in the Nobile Crater region near Mons Mouton — though Astrobotic's own current framing points to NET November 2026. After NASA cancelled the VIPER rover in July 2024 to avoid roughly $84M in additional near-term cost, Astrobotic kept the CLPS lander-demonstration task and re-manifested the mission around Astrolab's FLIP rover, its own CubeRover, and cultural payloads such as Nanofiche's Galactic Library archive. If it succeeds, Griffin would validate telerobotic operations, lunar mobility, and precision landing in the rugged polar terrain — a significant step up in lander scale following Astrobotic's earlier Peregrine flight — but the mission has not yet launched and no landing has occurred.