 landing on the moon is hard we're going back under this Artemis program we're going to be sending humans to the moon for the first time since Apollo so ahead of humans we want to get up as much science exploration and technology experiments as possible so clips starts facilitating a lot of the early science the things we want to learn before we can send humans clips stands for commercial lunar payload services CLPS the services part is a key element ordinarily when NASA delivers a payload to the surface of the moon they do it with a commercial partner but NASA controls the building of the vehicle now we're buying the service of delivery of our lunar payloads to the surface of the moon it is a delivery service akin to a delivery service that you'd have here on earth NASA will provide payloads to a commercial company they decide how to get it to the moon they have to develop their own lander but they also have to manage the entire end-to-end mission it's meant to provide affordable rapid frequent access to lunar surface through American companies we're funding different companies we have commercial companies that are competing to win task orders to deliver our payloads to the surface of the moon one of the goals when we started CLPS was to help establish a lunar economy somebody has to do it first and then it becomes commercially available then they're able to crank them up then they're able to make it more affordable and so the lunar surface is just the next frontier for a commercial environment but we had to acknowledge up front all the way through the highest levels of the agency leadership that some of them will fail these missions may not be as successful as a traditional NASA mission we have accepted the risk that going through this innovative approach with these commercial companies that there could be some failures some of them are new companies none of them have ever successfully landed on the surface of the moon so they're going to learn lessons we need to give our vendors the opportunity to learn and so that'll help ultimately buy down our risk as these companies learn okay what does it take to actually build up the lunar lander integrate payloads get to the lunar surface and land safely they've been able to demonstrate that they have very very good technical depth and the ability to design and execute missions we're willing to take more shots on goal we aren't risking human life and in the big picture if we're flying missions at one-tenth of the cost of a NASA mission and we fail two of them we still get eight missions for that same price even with one or two or three failures this is still a very economical proposition it's a risk posture which is more risk tolerant than NASA's accustomed to it there's not a single one of these companies that's willing to bet their mission on a coin toss every one of them is doing what they can in order to have the most successful mission possible but the important thing to realize that risk tolerant is not being risky and the rewards are a long-term ability to get payloads to the moon inexpensively frequently and rapidly we want science so we can then put more of our resources on even more science exploration and technology payloads and get more of a turn-on investment when we get to the moon clips provides tremendous benefit across the scientific and economic communities so there's a lot we'd like to learn about the moon to help human habitation and prepare us for missions to Mars and beyond so the moon is the first step