VIPER will go to the moon after all
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A fully built rover scheduled to fly to the moon next year will be decommissioned due to budget concerns, NASA said, leading researchers to wonder if the space company is committed to landing a crewed spacecraft on the moon in 2026, as it recently claims.
The Volatile Research Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will be sent to the Moon’s south pole in September 2025 to search for water ice. Equipped with a drill, the rover would have searched for ice beneath the lunar surface in several places, adding some permanently shadowed craters.
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However, on July 17, NASA announced that it would cancel the mission. “Decisions like this are never easy,” Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. “But in this case, the remaining planned VIPER expenses would have meant the cancellation or interruption of many other missions. We have made a decision to abandon this specific mission.
NASA has already spent $450 million on the rover, and the cancellation is expected to save only $84 million. The firm says it is open to “expressions of interest from U. S. industry and foreign partners” for the acquisition of the VIPER, but if this is achieved once completed by Aug. 1, it will be decommissioned for reuse on long-duration missions.
Phil Metzger of the University of Central Florida says the cancellation is a “very big mistake” on NASA’s part, especially given the agency’s broader purpose of getting humans to the moon’s south pole in 2026 as part of its Artemis program. using the Moon’s water ice as a resource for rocket fuel may also be at risk. ” “Having a rover with a drill is definitely an important component of the mission,” says Metzger. This will have an effect on human development plans. “
The cancellation of VIPER also means that China may have a merit in searching for resources on the Moon. Its next unmanned missions Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8, in 2026 and 2028 respectively, will target the Moon’s south pole to search for water ice.
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Other NASA projects, such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Mars Sample Return project to recover rocks from the Red Planet, have also faced cuts or cancellations due to shrinking budgets. “I certainly have no doubt that there is more bad news on the way,” says Tremblay.