Methodology

Mission & launch data

The mission catalog — missions, actors, payloads, regions, and the source links behind them — is a normalized public-data set, generated at build time. Each record carries a confidence label (High / Medium / Low, defined on About) and links to the public sources it rests on, indexed under Sources. Programmatic records — a contract, payload slot, or planning milestone — are not the same as a scheduled launch.

Federal funding data

Funding figures are federal lunar contract awards compiled from public U.S. government spending records — primarily NASA CLPS robotic-delivery task orders, plus the Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 2 human-landing-system (HLS) award, which is tracked and shown separately from the CLPS total. Every dollar is paired with an amount type — announced, current, obligated, potential, or an IDIQ ceiling — and an as-of date. These are reported award values, not audited spend. The as-of date is frequently the date the figure was crosswalked from public records, not the original announcement date, and a given line figure may be unverified at the contract level; where that is so it is presented as reported, not confirmed.

Recipient verification — SAM.gov by UEI

A recipient is marked SAM-verified only when its organization identity has been confirmed against the U.S. government's entity registry (SAM.gov) by Unique Entity ID (UEI), and that confirmation recorded in our data — with the registry's CAGE code and a link to the SAM.gov entity record where available.

This is a dated, human-reviewed verification pass — not a live lookup performed on every page view. A confirmed recipient stays marked verified in the data until a later pass re-checks it. The funding figures themselves are reported values; verification confirms who the recipient is, not that a specific dollar amount is correct.

How the headline CLPS total is counted

The headline figure sums one value per distinct CLPS task order — not per record. A single order is reported at several valuations (announced, then current, then obligated); we keep the most concrete one per order, preferring obligated, then current, then announced, then potential, so the same order is never counted more than once. IDIQ program ceilings are excluded. Read it as reported award value across distinct CLPS delivery orders, not audited net spend.

Human-landing-system (HLS) awards — e.g. Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 — are a different program (crewed landers, not CLPS robotic deliveries) and are shown as a separate figure, never folded into the CLPS total. The “SAM-confirmed” count is the number of underlying award records whose recipient is SAM.gov-verified, not a dollar amount.