Even though it’s already built.
Snake Pit
NASA will not be sending its half-billion dollar lunar rover to the Moon, it announced on Wednesday — even though the rover is already built.
Known as the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), the off-world explorer was intended to search for water ice on the surface of the Moon’s chilly south pole.
But those ambitious goals have incurred exorbitant expenses. The golf-cart-sized rover has already cost NASA $450 million. Now, with repeated delays and mounting costs, the agency has decided to cancel the mission entirely — the latest sign of a stringent budgetary environment at the space agency.
“Decisions like we’ve been discussing today are extremely difficult to make,” Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate, said during a news conference, as quoted by The New York Times. “We don’t make them lightly. We put a lot of thought into the best way to move forward.”
Unused and Unproven
VIPER will no longer be included in a launch it was originally scheduled to be aboard that takes place next year. Cutting its losses now is expected to save the agency at least $84 million dollars, according to Joel Kearns, the deputy associate administrator for exploration in the science directorate, per the NYT.
According to agency officials, VIPER’s costs had gone up by more than 30 percent, and even though it was fully built, extensive tests to evaluate how the rover would handle a rocket launch, as well as the conditions of space, would still need to be conducted. The outcome of those tests could have meant spending even more on building and research.
The latest estimate, according to Kearns via SpaceNews, was that continuing the mission would bring the total expenses to a staggering $609.6 million, and that’s assuming the rover performed flawlessly. Supply chain disruptions during the COVID Pandemic were cited as one of the reasons for why the project slowed and its budget bloated.
There were also delays with Griffin, a privately built lunar lander from the manufacturer Astrobotic that was supposed to bring VIPER down to the Moon. Griffin will still conduct a Moon landing with a mass simulator in the rover’s place, as a demonstration of its capabilities, for which NASA will pay the firm $323 million.
Money Management
VIPER, meanwhile, won’t be seeing action of any kind. That is, unless an American company or international partner is willing to use the untested rover at no additional cost to the government.
Most likely, though, it’ll just be scrapped. VIPER’s components and scientific instruments, including an ice drill and several spectrometers, can be used on other missions.
It’s an ignominious end for the rover, but on NASA’s tight budget, VIPER’s costs threatened to eat into other lunar missions.
If it was a choice between VIPER and freeing up money to make sure Artemis II and Artemis III, NASA’s missions to send astronauts back to the Moon for the first time in 50 years, go smoothly ahead, we wager it made the right call.
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