Astroport Space Technologies and Vermeer Corporation have announced a collaboration to adapt industrial surface mining equipment for autonomous lunar construction, a partnership that both companies frame as delivering the heavy machinery, or “Lunar Iron,” needed to build a permanent human presence on the Moon.
The announcement, made at the 20th International Conference on Engineering, Science, Construction and Operations in Challenging Environments (ASCE Earth & Space 2026) in College Station, Texas, centres on what the companies call “lunarisation” of Vermeer’s surface mining machinery. The work will use Astroport’s Universal Tool Implement Payload Adapter, or UTIPA, a modular system of interchangeable tools designed for robotic construction in the Moon’s extreme environment. Beginning with a surface miner application, the teams will re-engineer heavy equipment that traditionally relies on mass and weight to function, adapting it instead for the Moon’s low gravity, extreme temperature swings, and abrasive regolith.
What “Lunar Iron” means
The term is not a reference to iron ore. It is the companies’ shorthand for the class of heavy construction machinery that lunar base development will require: excavators, trenchers, and surface miners capable of digging foundations, grading roads, building landing pads, and preparing hardened sites for nuclear power systems and habitats. On Earth, this work is unremarkable. On the Moon, where equipment must operate autonomously in vacuum, survive temperature variations of more than 300 degrees Celsius between lunar day and night, and function without the gravitational force that gives terrestrial machines their cutting and trenching authority, it represents an engineering challenge that no one has yet solved at operational scale.
“Vermeer has always been about finding a better way to get tough work done,” said Jason Andringa, president and CEO of Vermeer Corporation. The company, he noted, has spent more than seven decades building equipment for farms, natural resource management, and underground construction. “This collaboration is an example of our continuation of that important work, applying our expertise in automation and heavy equipment to the lunar environment.”
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Sam Ximenes, Astroport’s founder and CEO, framed the partnership in terms of national policy. “Recent federal mandates have made it clear: the U.S. is committed to a permanent lunar presence, and that requires a robust space industrial base,” he said. “By partnering with Vermeer, we are delivering the ‘Lunar Iron’ necessary to dig foundations, build roads and landing pads, and provide the hardened infrastructure required for critical assets such as safe nuclear power deployment and habitation on the Moon.”
UTIPA: the adapter that makes it work
The technical centrepiece of the collaboration is Astroport’s UTIPA system. Rather than designing lunar construction equipment from scratch, the approach takes proven industrial machinery and adapts it through a modular payload interface. UTIPA provides a standardised connection between robotic platforms and interchangeable tool heads, allowing a single autonomous base unit to switch between surface mining, trenching, grading, and other construction tasks.
This matters because lunar construction is not a single activity. Building a base requires site preparation, which means excavating regolith to level terrain; road construction to connect landing zones with habitat sites; landing pad fabrication using sintered regolith; and trenching for power cables and thermal protection. A modular tool system means fewer machines need to be launched from Earth, and each one can serve multiple roles across the construction sequence.
Prototype testing will take place at Vermeer’s headquarters in Pella, Iowa, where the company can leverage its existing testing infrastructure for heavy machinery. The collaboration will focus initially on adapting Vermeer’s high-torque cutting and trenching technologies, which are designed for continuous operation in hard ground and rock, for the demanding conditions of the lunar surface.
The NASA demand signal
The partnership aligns with NASA’s Moon Base programme, which aims to construct lunar infrastructure by 2030. The Artemis programme has already flown its crewed lunar flyby mission and is targeting lunar landings beginning in 2028, with approximately annual missions thereafter. Permanent habitation will require exactly the kind of site preparation and civil engineering that Astroport and Vermeer are developing: excavated foundations, graded roads, sintered landing pads, and hardened enclosures for fission power reactors.
Astroport has been building toward this moment methodically. The company holds multiple NASA contracts for lunar construction technology, including STTR Phase II funding for its Brickbot regolith-processing demonstrator. In February 2026, Astroport and Venturi Astrolab conducted a successful field demonstration of an integrated excavator payload on Astrolab’s FLEX rover, moving an average of 94 kilograms of regolith simulant in 3.5 minutes. The company has also partnered with ispace for future delivery of science instruments for regolith research, and with Orbit Fab to develop in-situ resource utilisation systems for converting regolith into water, oxygen, and metals.
Vermeer’s lunar credentials come through its existing partnership with Interlune, the Seattle-based startup harvesting helium-3. Together, they unveiled a full-scale excavation prototype in May 2025, capable of processing 100 metric tonnes of regolith per hour. The Department of Energy has signed a purchase agreement with Interlune for lunar helium-3, and Vermeer plans to begin operations within four to six years.
The broader picture
The Astroport-Vermeer collaboration sits within a rapidly maturing lunar construction ecosystem. Interlune and Astrolab announced their own partnership in March 2026. Blue Origin, SpaceX, and multiple international agencies are developing lunar landers and habitation modules. But the common bottleneck across all of these programmes is the same: nobody has yet demonstrated the ability to perform heavy civil engineering on the Moon at the scale that permanent habitation demands.
Astroport operates from San Antonio, Texas, with branches in Luxembourg and Adelaide, Australia, positioning it across the three major spacefaring blocs. Vermeer, a family-owned company whose equipment operates in more than 60 countries, brings manufacturing scale and supply-chain depth that most space startups lack.
Whether the partnership can close the gap between terrestrial prototypes and lunar-rated hardware remains the open question. The Moon’s regolith is finer and more abrasive than any soil on Earth, and its electrostatic properties cause dust to cling to every surface, degrading seals, bearings, and optical systems. Low gravity changes the physics of excavation, cutting, and material transport in ways that are difficult to simulate accurately on Earth.
But the commercial and political momentum is unmistakable. The US government has committed to permanent lunar habitation by the end of this decade, and the companies that can deliver construction-ready hardware will be first in line for the contracts that follow. Astroport and Vermeer are betting that the best way to build on the Moon is to start with what already works on Earth, and adapt from there.
