NASA could spend $800 million to send this revolutionary rover to the moon
The VIPER lunar rover promised a revolution in our valuable ice deposits on the Moon. NASA then canceled the mission.
By Michael Greshko
NASA’s VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) is assembled in the blank room at the agency’s Johnson Space Center.
POT
In early June, NASA engineers put the finishing touches on a technological marvel years in the making: a golf cart-sized vehicle designed to drive in darkness and darkness near the Moon’s south pole. looking for water ice. If successful, the $450 million rover, called Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), would nevertheless provide a very important “ground truth” for decades of hypotheses about where water is located on the Moon, energizing lunar science and a new foreign space. Race to collect ice for air, water and fuel.
But now, this fully assembled rover could simply be destroyed. Facing serious budget shortfalls, NASA officials announced the cancellation of VIPER last Wednesday, sparking sadness and fury among lunar scientists across the United States.
“I was surprised and dismayed. . . This could possibly be the maximum vital cislunar area progression project that NASA has ever conceived,” said planetary scientist Phil Metzger of the University of Central Florida.
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Barring a VIPER Ave Maria pass to a local company in another country or to a private American company, the revolutionary rover will be dismembered into pieces in a few weeks. To add insult to injury, having purchased the non-refundable VIPER from the lunar surface for more than $300 million, NASA intends to fly a fictional “mass simulator” instead. To avoid additional expenses and delays, NASA rejected the idea of sending any of the rover’s clinical tools aboard.
In total, if VIPER fails to fly, the company will have spent around $800 million to send a real peso to the Moon.
For more than two decades, data collected in lunar orbit have suggested that water ice is abundant on the surface near the Moon’s north and south poles, especially in the frigid, sunless depths of craters. But so far, no project has reached those peaks. latitudes and determine those observations very well. How far does the ice go?Is the moon’s water simply made up of individual molecules attached to grains on the ground, or are patches of ice hidden in the polar shadows?
VIPER was designed to answer those questions. The 950-pound rover could simply navigate dangerous lunar terrain to reach a site of interest, analyze the surface’s ice content with a three-foot-deep drill, and then move to another location. start again. The project was to last one hundred Earth days and would travel about 12 kilometers across the surface of the Moon.
“It’s vital from a clinical standpoint, but for this total ‘lunar economy’ that’s unfolding—the concept of in-situ resource use—it’s literally vital to know how much water ice there is,” says Amanda Hendrix of the Planetary Science Institute.
NASA’s original plan for VIPER was to spend $433. 5 million to build the rover, with a launch date expected in 2023. But to account for delays in the rover’s trip to the Moon (a lander called Griffin evolved through the personal company Astrobotic), NASA made a decision. in 2022 to delay the project’s launch date until 2024. The company has now assessed that neither VIPER nor Griffin would be fit to fly until at least September 2025, which NASA says would increase the project’s burden. through 2026 to $609. 6 million (not including the $323 million paid).
At a press briefing on July 17, officials said canceling the rover would save $84 million while also avoiding significant cuts to the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which aims to bring NASA’s tools to the moon with personal landing robots. “Of course, they’re never easy and we don’t take it lightly,” Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said at the briefing.
NASA regularly goes to the trouble of telegraphing the growing chances of canceling a complicated mission. The agency’s Psyche mission, introduced in 2023 to explore a metal-rich asteroid of the same name, previously faced grueling scrutiny for its delays and cargo overflows, despite everything flying. In past cases where missions struggled while spacecraft were already built, United States government agencies regularly chose to delay their launches rather than cancel them outright.
On the other hand, VIPER’s abrupt end follows months of highly visual steps toward liftoff. In March, NASA’s Ames Research Center, which led the design of the VIPER, livestreamed the rover’s construction. In May, the VIPER team won approval for its plan to test the rover under pressure. By the time of the press conference on July 17, VIPER was already fully assembled and had successfully passed vibration checks.
Signs of budget calamity were few and late; In June, a report from the U. S. Government Accountability Office warned that VIPER’s fiscal year 2024 budget allocation would run out in July. But even two weeks ago, senior NASA officials gave no public hint that VIPER was on the chopping block. In a July 10 presentation to NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee, NASA deputy associate administrator for exploration Joel Kearns said VIPER and Griffin would not launch before 2024, as previously estimated. However, he did not say anything about the possible completion of the project.
At the July 17 press conference, Fox and Kearns noted that NASA’s lunar missions are still underway and that versions of the VIPER tools will fly for the missions.
“This is a tricky and disappointing resolution — we all know that — that we had to make in an doubtful and constrained fiscal environment,” Kearns added a presentation at NASA’s annual Exploration Science Forum on July 23. This is how we can continue to aid a lunar science portfolio and our commitment to reading the Moon.
In interviews with Scientific American, scientists emphasized that the total of VIPER is more than the sum of its parts. Future CLPS rovers target sites at the moon’s low latitudes, not ice-rich poles. An upcoming CLPS project called PRIME-1 will attempt to land a drill near the moon’s south pole later this year. This spacecraft, however, will provide data on water ice from one place, of the many promised by VIPER.
“I’m very involved with the message that NASA is giving in terms of ‘Oh, well, we don’t want to do VIPER because we’re doing other things,’ because what VIPER was going to do is surely unique. “says Benjamin Greenhagen, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and chairman of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, which advises NASA on lunar science questions.
NASA is “putting lipstick on a pig” with its intention to cancel VIPER, adds Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame. “Taking into account what those other missions are going to do and what VIPER is going to do, the difference in clinical production is orders of magnitude. “
At the July 17 briefing, Fox and Kearns emphasized that NASA’s budget disorders were primarily to blame for the VIPER disaster. Under a 2005 law, NASA will have to get authorization from Congress to spend additional money on a project that exceeds base prices by more than 30 percent. VIPER’s strategy for reaching this threshold prompted a review of the project in June. And under strict budget regulations passed last summer, NASA has very little room to reallocate funds.
In June 2023, Biden’s leadership and congressional Republicans reached an agreement to suspend and then raise the U. S. debt ceiling, avoiding a default on the national debt. But in return, the agreement called for a two-year freeze on spending grades at NASA and other non-military federal agencies. This limitation has created a billion-dollar gap in NASA’s planned science budget. In response, the company was forced to propose far-reaching cuts, adding the premature closure of the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
In a NASA budget proposal released July 9, the House Appropriations Committee is offering between $458 million and $533 million to NASA’s program hosting VIPER, or up to $75 million. dollars more than Biden’s leadership had requested. While this language would give NASA some flexibility to increase investment for VIPER, it also creates a zero-sum game because Congress has not indicated that it would increase NASA’s overall science budget.
“The money would have to come from another project,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society. “They care but not enough to ‘solve the problem,’ as it were.”
Technical difficulties also influenced the downfall of VIPER, specifically Griffin, the lunar lander built by Astrobotic and intended to take the rover to the Moon. When Astrobotic won its contract, it had never flown on a lunar project before; To manage this risk, NASA has asked Astrobotic to conduct more tests and agreed to delay the launch from 2023 to 2024. Last January, Astrobotic presented its first project to the Moon as a component of NASA’s CLPS program. But in a devastating twist, the project’s lander suffered a critical failure shortly after liftoff, preventing it from reaching the Moon.
According to Kearns, Astrobotic has completed a review of the failure of this inaugural project and is evaluating whether to make adjustments to Griffin in response. The scenario with Griffin “could even lead, potentially, to an Array scenario. . . where NASA could begin to “We cannot ask whether the reliability of the lander’s functionality is proportional to the maximum price we invest in a primary payload like VIPER,” Kearns said at the NASA forum on July 23.
Last weekend, lunar scientists began organizing in a last-ditch attempt to influence Congress, circulating an unusually concise open letter calling on Congress to refuse to allow VIPER to be canceled. “The resolution to cancel the allocation at this stage, after spending $450 million, is unprecedented and defensible,” the letter reads.
As of July 23, the letter had amassed more than 1,000 signatories, addressed to Ben Fernando, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University, one of the letter’s authors.
If VIPER doesn’t fly, some U. S. scientists worry that China will take the lead in prospecting for lunar resources. The country’s ambitious lunar program has seen a number of recent successes, adding the first comfortable landing and the project of returning to the Moon. China’s next two lunar robot projects, Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8, will search for water ice near the south pole and test technologies for a long-term lunar science base. Chang’e 7 is expected to launch in 2026, followed by Chang’e 8 in 2028.
“It’s a race, and right now the speed at which China is progressing is much faster than ours,” says Akbar Whizin, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute.
“We’re accomplishing some of the basic objectives of those missions, which is to land and take measurements. “
There is still a chance, albeit small, that VIPER will fly aboard Griffin, even without NASA’s continued involvement. In a statement to Scientific American, Astrobotic reaffirmed its commitment to launching its lunar lander. “Decisions need to be made quickly, but we are considering all options,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic.
NASA has asked foreign partners and U. S. personal corporations to show an explicit interest in acquiring VIPER at no additional cost to the U. S. government. U. S. However, the Aug. 1 deadline for those proposals is fast approaching, and a handful of entities on the planet have the cash. and means to adopt VIPER.
“Basically, [there is] almost 0 time,” says Whizin. But this [mission] is already a public-private partnership, so it is uncharted waters. ”
Michael Greshko is a freelance science journalist based in Washington, D. C. and former science editor of National Geographic. His paintings have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Science, Atlas Obscura, MIT Technology Review, and elsewhere. Follow Greshko on social media here.
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