NASA Taps Seven U.S. Firms to Mature Tech for Habitable Worlds Telescope

NASA has awarded three-year contracts to seven U.S. companies to develop ultra-precise optics, starlight-blocking instruments and in-space servicing tools for a proposed space telescope designed to search for signs of life on Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars.

The awards, announced Jan. 5 in a NASA Headquarters news release, are aimed at advancing key technologies for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), the agency’s next flagship space telescope concept. The mission has not yet been formally approved, but if built it would be the first observatory explicitly optimized to directly image Earth-size planets around Sun-like stars and analyze their atmospheres for potential biosignatures.

“The Habitable Worlds Observatory is exactly the kind of bold, forward-leaning science that only NASA can undertake,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in the statement. “Humanity is waiting for the breakthroughs this mission is capable of achieving and the questions it could help us answer about life in the universe. We intend to move with urgency, and expedite timelines to the greatest extent possible to bring these discoveries to the world.”

Seven companies selected

The contracts, all fixed price and running up to three years, went to:

• Astroscale U.S. Inc. (Denver)
• BAE Systems Space and Mission Systems Inc. (Boulder, Colorado)
• Busek Co. Inc. (Natick, Massachusetts)
• L3Harris Technologies Inc. (Rochester, New York)
• Lockheed Martin Inc. (Palo Alto, California)
• Northrop Grumman Inc. (Redondo Beach, California)
• Zecoat Corp. (Granite City, Illinois)

NASA did not disclose the dollar value of the individual awards.

Agency officials said the work will focus on three mission-critical areas:

1. Ultra-stable large optics
2. An “extreme performance” coronagraph capable of blocking a star’s light to reveal orbiting planets billions of times fainter
3. In-space servicing and upgrade designs

Why the technology is difficult

For HWO to detect and characterize Earth analogs, its optics must remain extraordinarily steady. NASA says the telescope’s mirrors and structure will have to maintain stability to motions “no more than the width of an atom” during observations—translating into picometer- to nanometer-scale control while the spacecraft is subjected to thermal changes and small vibrations.

“’Are we alone in the universe?’ is an audacious question to answer, but one that our nation is poised to pursue, leveraging the groundwork we’ve laid from previous NASA flagship missions,” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division, said in the Jan. 5 release. “Awards like these are a critical component of our incubator program for future missions, which combines government leadership with commercial innovation to make what is impossible today rapidly implementable in the future.”

The Habitable Worlds Observatory emerged from the 2020 Decadal Survey in Astronomy and Astrophysics, a once-a-decade report by the National Academies that sets priorities for U.S. space and ground-based observatories. That report recommended as the top large space priority a roughly 6-meter infrared, optical and ultraviolet telescope capable of directly imaging and obtaining spectra of about 25 potentially habitable exoplanets.

To pull that off, HWO would need to suppress a host star’s light by a factor of at least 10 billion using an internal coronagraph—an instrument that blocks or cancels starlight while transmitting the light from closely orbiting planets. NASA says HWO’s coronagraph must be “thousands of times more capable than any space coronagraph ever built,” exceeding even the advanced demonstrator that will fly on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope later this decade.

What each contractor is expected to contribute

The seven companies selected for the latest round of work represent a mix of large aerospace primes and specialized small and mid-size firms, each with experience in technologies NASA sees as critical to HWO.

• Astroscale U.S., a subsidiary of Japanese-founded Astroscale, has focused on space debris removal and satellite life-extension missions. Industry analysts say its HWO work is likely to center on designing servicing architectures—grapple fixtures, rendezvous concepts and refueling options—to allow future robotic or crewed vehicles to repair or upgrade the observatory.

• BAE Systems’ Space and Mission Systems unit, formerly Ball Aerospace, and L3Harris both have long histories building optical systems and instruments for Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope and national security payloads. BAE already leads a NASA-funded effort known as ULTRA-CT to study ultra-stable optical systems for HWO. The new contract is expected to extend work on primary mirror assemblies, precision structures and high-fidelity optical modeling, with L3Harris contributing wavefront sensing, control electronics and other precision hardware.

• Busek, a niche propulsion company, supplies electric thrusters to civil and commercial missions and has developed ultra-low-noise electrospray thrusters for extremely fine pointing control. Such systems are considered candidates for HWO’s micro-propulsion, needed to keep the telescope steady without introducing vibrations that would blur its view of distant planets.

• Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, both prime contractors on past NASA flagships, are expected to focus on overall observatory architecture, deployment mechanisms, and structural and thermal stability. Northrop Grumman served as the prime on JWST and leads a current NASA technology project called STABLE, aimed at structures and baffles that maintain optical alignment amid disturbances.

• Zecoat, a small Illinois firm specializing in thin-film coatings for large mirrors, is expected to work on broadband, high-reflectivity coatings that perform from the ultraviolet through the near-infrared while minimizing scattered light—a key requirement for high-contrast coronagraphy.

How this fits into NASA’s long-term plan

The contracts build on earlier HWO-related awards. In 2024, NASA committed $17.5 million over two years to three projects focused on modeling and laboratory demonstrations of ultra-stable optics and structures. The agency has also run multi-year studies on segmented telescope architectures. The new industry awards mark a shift toward more applied, system-level technology maturation.

HWO is the first mission to enter NASA’s Great Observatories Mission and Technology Maturation Program (GOMAP), created in response to the Decadal Survey. The program is intended to mature key technologies and refine mission architectures before NASA commits to full development, an approach shaped by the long delays and cost overruns that plagued the James Webb Space Telescope.

Under the decadal recommendation, NASA will spend most of the 2020s refining HWO’s design and technologies. If progress and budgets allow, formal mission formulation could begin in the early to mid-2030s, with a possible launch in the early 2040s.

Budget pressure and potential partners

The new contracts come as NASA faces political and budget pressures. Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and commercial astronaut closely associated with SpaceX, was confirmed as the agency’s 15th administrator on Dec. 18, 2025, after a contentious nomination process. President Donald Trump’s administration has said it wants to reduce NASA’s workforce and seek a significant agency-wide budget cut in its fiscal 2026 proposal, according to public budget discussions and reporting by several news organizations.

Supporters of the GOMAP approach argue that relatively modest investments in technology now could reduce the risk of larger cost growth later. Critics of deep cuts warn that major flagships such as HWO and other future “Great Observatories” recommended by the Decadal Survey could be delayed, scaled back or canceled if funding is not sustained.

International partners are already watching HWO’s progress. The European Space Agency has solicited European scientists to participate in NASA’s planning teams, signaling potential trans-Atlantic collaboration similar to that on JWST.

A concept—for now

For now, HWO remains a concept, and the new contracts represent early steps rather than a green light to build a multibillion-dollar observatory. NASA officials say the goal is to ensure that if and when a formal mission is approved, the riskiest pieces of technology—atom-steady optics, a record-breaking coronagraph and a serviceable design—are ready.

If the program proceeds and the technologies perform as planned, the Habitable Worlds Observatory could, decades from now, return images and spectra of distant planets that resemble Earth, offering the first direct evidence of whether worlds like our own are common—and whether any of them show signs of life.