Partnership
Honeybee Robotics x Firefly Aerospace (Gruithuisen Domes Lunar Rover)
Firefly Aerospace contracted Honeybee Robotics to provide the lunar rover for NASA's task order to explore the Gruithuisen Domes on the Moon's near side in 2028. The rover will carry NASA's Lunar-VISE instruments to investigate the subsurface composition of the Gruithuisen Gamma Dome, deployed by Firefly's Blue Ghost lander.
deployment · Active · operating
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e6fbc255-2e70-4f6d-910f-1dfa2c78d76a- Type
- deployment
- Status
- Activeoperating
- Announced
- 2025-03-241.4 years ago
- Active for
- 1.4 years
Who’s involved
Honeybee Robotics, LLC is an American space robotics company headquartered in Longmont, Colorado, with additional facilities in Altadena, California and Greenbelt, Maryland. Founded in 1983 by Steve Gorevan and Chris Chapman, the company designs and builds robotic drilling, sampling, and manipulation systems for planetary exploration, with hardware on every successful NASA Mars rover mission since Spirit and Opportunity. The company built the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) on the Mars Exploration Rovers, the Sample Manipulation System and Dust Removal Tool on Curiosity, and the Phoenix Scoop on the 2008 Phoenix Lander. Acquired by Ensign-Bickford Industries in 2017, then sold to Blue Origin in January 2022, Honeybee is now a Blue Origin subsidiary with ~284 employees and ~$75M revenue. The company has launched over 3,000 components and systems to space, with current missions including NASA's VIPER lunar rover, Mars Sample Return, JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), and [Dragonfly](/companies/dragonfly-ai) to Titan.
Most-frequent partners
American space and defense technology company developing launch vehicles ([Alpha](/companies/alpha-technologies)), lunar landers (Blue Ghost), and orbital vehicles. Record Q1 2026 revenue of $80.9M. $332M total funding across 4 rounds.
Most-frequent partners
Off-registry parties
- NASA · customer
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Sources (1)
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