ONE DAY LAST DECEMBER, John Walker Moosbrugger, a 25-year-old project manager for the lunar robotics start-up Astrobotic, sat in front of the company's clean room and watched as an instrument older than him was attached to a moon lander. After the competition ended, many of these companies continued working on their landers, rovers and instruments, in Astrobotic's case even lining up customers for eventual trips. As of April 2022, CLPS had awarded contracts for seven deliveries from four companies: Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, Firefly Aerospace and Masten Space Systems. But in vying for the prize, several companies had built lander prototypes and rovers that could theoretically deliver all kinds of cargo to the moon, in some cases much more cheaply than a traditional nasa mission. [Extracted from the article]