NASA's SSERVI CAN-5 Gives You 20 Days to Decide: Step-1 Due September 29, Five Teams, $1.8M a Year, and a Review That Hides Your Name

NASA released the final text of SSERVI CAN-5 — Cooperative Agreement Notice NNH26ZDA016C — on September 1, 2026. The Step-1 proposal is due September 29, 2026 at 11:59:59 p.m. EDT. That is a twenty-day window from posting to gate.

For a solicitation that hands out roughly $9 million per team over five years, twenty days sounds absurd. It is not, and understanding why is the difference between treating CAN-5 as a lost cause and treating it as the most efficient proposal decision on the fall calendar.

What CAN-5 actually funds

The Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute is not a grant program in the ordinary sense. It is a distributed institute: NASA selects a small number of multi-institutional teams — nodes — and funds each as a member of a single virtual organization, jointly supported by the Science Mission Directorate and the Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate.

The CAN-5 numbers, as published:

• About five awards
• Up to $1.8 million per team per year
• Five-year award period
• Roughly $9 million per team, subject to appropriations and continued funding
• Cooperative agreement, not a grant — expect substantial NASA programmatic involvement
• No cost sharing

The science scope: "basic and/or applied research fundamental to understanding the nature of the Moon and its near space environment to enable future human exploration of the Moon with Artemis." NASA also explicitly welcomes "Mars forward" proposals — lunar-focused research that develops approaches transferable to eventual Mars exploration. That clause is doing real work; it widens the eligible science well past strict selenology without inviting a Mars proposal wearing a lunar hat.

Eligibility runs to U.S. institutions: public and private universities, 501(c)(3) nonprofits, state and local governments, for-profits and small businesses. Non-U.S. researchers can participate as collaborators but cannot lead or receive NASA funds, except under the no-exchange-of-funds arrangements described in NASA's Grant and Cooperative Agreement Manual.

Submission is NSPIRES only. The Grants.gov listing is a synopsis; there is no Grants.gov application package. Proposers must be affiliated with an institution registered at nspires.nasaprs.com, and if that registration is not current, that is the first thing to fix — not the science.

The 20-day window is a feature

CAN-5 uses a two-step process, and only proposers who submit a Step-1 are eligible to submit a Step-2. Step-2 is due December 4, 2026 — ten weeks after the gate.

So the real calendar is not twenty days for a $9 million proposal. It is twenty days to establish standing, then ten weeks to write. Step-1 exists precisely so that NASA can size the review panel and so that teams do not burn a full proposal cycle on a concept that is out of scope.

The trap is the corollary: if you miss September 29, December 4 does not exist for you. There is no late entry, no waiver, no "we'll consider it if it's strong." A team that spends October deciding whether to compete has already decided.

There is a second timing constraint that catches teams every cycle. Section D.1.4 of the CAN sets restrictions and deadlines on changes to the Principal Investigator and other key personnel between Step-1 and Step-2. In practice this means the leadership structure you declare on September 29 is not freely editable in November. Teams that submit a placeholder PI intending to sort it out later can find they have locked themselves into the placeholder. Name the person you mean.

Dual-anonymous review changes how you write, not just what you redact

CAN-5 proposals are reviewed under dual anonymous peer review. Step-2 full proposals split into Volume A — the anonymized scientific material reviewers see — and Volume B — the non-anonymous content including team identity, institutional capability, budget, and management.

Every proposal team underestimates this. Anonymization is not a find-and-replace pass on author names. In a field as small as lunar science, a proposal deanonymizes itself through:

• Self-citation phrasing. "Building on our prior work (Smith et al. 2024)" identifies you. "Building on prior work (Smith et al. 2024)" does not — cite yourself in the third person, exactly as you would cite a competitor.
• Instrument and facility names. A sentence describing analysis on a one-of-a-kind chamber names your institution as surely as a letterhead would.
• Mission role claims. "Our team's role on the payload" is a signature. Describe the capability, not the pedigree.
• Acknowledgment and grant-number residue. Prior award numbers left in a recycled methods section are a common failure.

The strategic consequence is bigger than the mechanics. Under DAPR, reputation does not carry the science section. Volume A has to win on the merit of the questions and the credibility of the approach, with the institutional muscle quarantined into Volume B. Teams accustomed to leading with a track record have to restructure the argument: the science case must stand up as if written by strangers, because to the panel it was.

Write Volume A first, anonymously, before anyone drafts Volume B. Teams that write normally and anonymize afterward produce documents with the seams showing.

The $180,000 line item most teams discover too late

CAN-5 makes two program components mandatory, and both consume budget before the first instrument is turned on.

A Workforce Development Plan is required: how the team will build knowledge, develop skills, and prepare students and early-career researchers. This is not a paragraph. In a virtual-institute model where cross-node training is much of the point, it is a scored element.

Public engagement is required, satisfied through one or more of Citizen Science, Science Activation, or Space Apps activities. Teams may dedicate up to an average of $180,000 per year from the overall budget to these engagement efforts combined.

Do the arithmetic against a $1.8 million annual ceiling. The engagement carve-out can absorb up to ten percent of the award. That is not a rounding error on a five-year plan — it is roughly a full-time position plus program costs, sustained for five years, that does not appear in your science budget.

Teams routinely build the science plan to the ceiling, then discover engagement has to come out of it. Build the engagement budget first, at whatever level you actually intend, and let the science plan size itself to what remains. A proposal whose engagement plan is obviously an afterthought reads as one, and NASA has made it a requirement rather than an option for a reason.

Complementarity is a scoring criterion, not a courtesy

The CAN text states that proposed research "that complements current CAN-4 Institute Teams, and/or addresses important research areas not currently covered in the Institute will be given strong consideration."

That sentence should reorganize your topic selection. SSERVI is an institute, and NASA is assembling a portfolio, not ranking five independent proposals. Duplicating a sitting team's core thrust is a scoring liability even if your version is better.

The CAN-4 cohort selected in May 2023 — five teams at roughly $1.5 million per year for five years — includes LunaSCOPE (Brown University, Alexander Evans), the Center for Lunar Origin and Evolution (Southwest Research Institute, Bill Bottke), CASA Moon for advanced sample analysis of astromaterials, and RASSLE (Johns Hopkins, Dana Hurley). NASA maintains the current roster at sservi.nasa.gov/sserviteams.

Before you write anything, read that roster the way a portfolio manager would. Map the covered territory, find the gap, and say so explicitly in the proposal — a sentence naming what the current institute does not cover is worth more than a paragraph asserting your own novelty.

Note also what the per-team number says. CAN-4 ran at about $1.5 million per year; CAN-5 goes to $1.8 million — a 20 percent increase in nominal terms. Across the three years between selections, that is closer to flat in real dollars, and the required engagement carve-out consumes part of it. Budget as though the raise is smaller than it looks, because functionally it is.

What to do in the next twenty days

1. Verify NSPIRES registration for the PI and every co-investigator today. Registration problems surface at submission, not before.
2. Decide the PI, for real. Section D.1.4 limits changes after Step-1.
3. Read the CAN-4 roster and pick your gap before drafting a word of science.
4. Draft Step-1 to establish scope and standing, not to impress. Its job is to get you to December 4.
5. Start the Volume A / Volume B split immediately. Anonymization is a writing method, not a cleanup step.
6. Set the engagement budget now, up to the $180,000-per-year average, and size the science to the remainder.

Twenty days is enough to answer one question honestly: does this team have a lunar research program that fills a hole in the current institute, and can it be written by strangers? If yes, submit Step-1 and take the ten weeks. If no, the December deadline was never yours anyway — and finding that out on September 29 is considerably cheaper than finding it out on December 4.