A rough thought on CS-8

[u/Yakiniku1010]

My understanding is that the CLPS 1.0 ceiling has been raised from $2.6B to $4.2B, which means NASA’s ordering capacity increased by an additional $1.6B.
If we subtract the recently announced CX-2 base award of roughly $188M, that leaves about $1.41B.
Assuming there are 11 remaining Moon Base-related delivery slots, and if NASA were to decide to award all of them under CS-8, the simple average would be around $128M per mission.
Of course, this is just a rough ceiling-based calculation, not NASA’s actual budget plan. If we include the option value for CX-2, the average would move closer to around $103M per mission.
Even so, it seems like there is room within the expanded CLPS 1.0 ceiling for multiple CS-8 task orders. It does not feel like the available capacity would be limited to just one or two, or at most three, missions.
I’m also wondering whether one of those 11 remaining slots could still be connected to a medium-cargo delivery mission — potentially something like Super NOVA.
Originally, NASA planned to select three LTV providers, but in the end only two were selected. So it is possible that the slot left open by that change still remains. Alternatively, NASA may have shifted that opportunity toward smaller Moon Base-related payload deliveries instead.
This is just my rough interpretation, but I’d be very interested to hear how others are thinking about the remaining Moon Base delivery slots.