NASA Cancels VIPER’s Trip to the Moon After Spending $450 Million on Rover

NASA’s boxy four-wheeled rover won’t marque it to the Moon aft all, owed to improvement delays and mounting costs that person seemingly pushed the abstraction bureau to telephone disconnected its ice-hunting mission.

VIPER, oregon Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, was designed to find and survey h2o crystal connected the Moon’s southbound pole. NASA had spent astir $450 cardinal connected the development of its 1,000-pound rover, which was primitively expected to motorboat successful precocious 2023. The motorboat day was archetypal pushed backmost to 2024 and aboriginal to 2025 owed to further docket and proviso concatenation delays. Now, the abstraction bureau decided to cancel the ngo altogether, arsenic it threatens to disrupt different commercialized payload missions to the Moon, NASA announced connected Wednesday.

VIPER was expected to motorboat with Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, which was meant to present the rover to the Moon nether a Commercial Lunar Payload Services task bid worthy $322 million. The Griffin ngo itself was delayed to September 2025. Still, NASA says it remains committed to exploring the lunar aboveground with the assistance of its commercialized partners.

“The bureau has an array of missions planned to look for crystal and different resources connected the Moon implicit the adjacent 5 years,” Nicola Fox, subordinate head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said successful a statement. “Our way guardant volition marque maximum usage of the exertion and enactment that went into VIPER, portion preserving captious funds to enactment our robust lunar portfolio.”

NASA volition disassemble the VIPER rover and reuse its parts for aboriginal missions to the Moon. But earlier it takes isolated the robot, the abstraction bureau volition archetypal see proposals from its commercialized and planetary partners that whitethorn amusement involvement successful utilizing VIPER.

Prior to its cancelation, NASA had described VIPER arsenic the astir susceptible robot it would nonstop to the lunar surface, and the ngo was integral to NASA’s aboriginal plans of establishing a sustainable quality beingness connected the Moon. VIPER was designed to delve into permanently shadowed areas connected the lunar southbound rod to hunt for pockets of h2o ice, which could beryllium utilized by aboriginal astronauts arsenic portion of NASA’s Artemis program.

The ngo could person informed landing sites for upcoming Artemis missions, but NASA says it volition “pursue alternate methods to execute galore of VIPER’s goals and verify the beingness of crystal astatine the lunar South Pole.” The Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1), a NASA payload scheduled to onshore successful precocious 2024, volition hunt for h2o crystal utilizing a drill and wide spectrometer to measurement the volatile contented of subsurface materials.