VIPER Mission Cancelled: NASA Will Have to Dismantle $0.45 Billion Rover
The VIPER project had to be stopped “on takeoff”
The space agency spent about $450 million and several years to implement the project. The development of individual components and modules was carried out by different organizations on NASA's order. The rover's destination is the South Pole of the Moon.
Unfortunately, the device will not fly anywhere. NASA announced about the cancellation of the mission due to delivery delays and cost overruns.
“NASA has made the decision to terminate the VIPER mission,” stated Nicky Fox, head of the agency's scientific directorate. “Decisions of this magnitude are never easy, and this is no exception. In this case, further spending on VIPER could have led to cancellations or significant problems for other missions in our Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.”
This is unfortunate news for the scientific community, as NASA has been touting the mission's scientific significance for years.
The purpose of the VIPER mission (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) – search for water ice and analyze rocks at the south pole of the Moon. These studies are important as a scientific basis for preparing future missions to develop lunar resources within the Artemis program.
The rover is about the size of a golf cart — 1.4 x 1.4 x 2 m. It has four wheels, headlights, and a TRIDENT drill (The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrains). The task of the one-meter drill is to dig to the subsurface layers of soil for study with other scientific instruments:
the Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS) searches for subsurface hydrogen compounds, potentially water ice;
NIRVSS (Near InfraRed Volatiles Spectrometer System) infrared spectrometer allows you to analyze the mineral composition of the soil and volatile substances. Determine whether the detected NSS compounds are water or hydroxyls (OH- ion);
The MSolo (Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations) mass spectrometer analyzes the content of other substances in the soil in solid and gaseous forms.
The lunar apparatus was to study and analyze the compounds and components that are on the surface or under its upper layer. The results of the rover's work would help researchers understand the composition and distribution of minerals on the Earth's satellite. In parallel, scientists planned to test the robot and evaluate the capabilities of all its systems in harsh conditions.
The VIPER mission could be an important step toward launching other long-term missions to the Moon, as it was expected to find water and understand how it is distributed on the Moon. That's why a rover is needed – maybe there won't be any water ice on the hill, but there will be plenty of it in a hole nearby.
Finding water on the Moon is important. It can be used for drinking, oxygen, and even rocket fuel: it can be split into hydrogen and oxygen using solar power and used to fuel a spacecraft. Every kilogram brought from Earth increases the cost of an expedition by about a hundred thousand dollars. The ability to use local resources will increase the scale and duration of missions.
Reasons for the fiasco
It all started with supply chain issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. Components for Astrobotic’s VIPER rover and Griffin lander failed to arrive on time. The delays caused the spacecraft to fall behind schedule. Another bottleneck is requirements NASA will conduct additional tests of Griffin in 2022, which will increase the overall cost of the project from an initial $433 million to more than $609 million. The launch was planned for late 2023, but was then pushed back to September 2025.
Realizing that things were not going according to plan, NASA launched a cost-benefit review. It became clear that the additional costs of VIPER would hurt other lunar missions. The project was under threat of being shut down. As a last resort, the space agency announced that it would accept proposals from American companies and international partners interested in using the already built VIPER rover until August 1, 2024. But no one was willing to pay the additional costs of delivering the rover to the Moon.
We'll have to dismantle it for spare parts.
Engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston finished rover assembly in April 2024. Mission management has authorized final environmental testing to ensure VIPER can withstand the acoustic and vibration loads of launch and the extreme temperature fluctuations of space.
The rover is fully assembled, but to use it, NASA needs to conduct a series of long-term tests on Earth and complete the development of VIPER's ground control systems on the Moon. Then it needs to deliver the Griffin lunar lander to the surface of the Earth's satellite. Astrobotic developed it to deliver VIPER. All of these operations require significant resources, and NASA has run out of budget for the mission.
According to Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for science at NASA's Science Mission Directorate, it would have cost about $84 million more to complete the VIPER mission and keep it operating on the lunar surface for 100 days. No one has stepped forward to take financial responsibility for the mission, so NASA is forced to disassemble the rover and use its parts and modules for other purposes and programs.
“We are disappointed,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic. “This is certainly bad news… The VIPER team has been great, and we are very sorry that we will not be able to deliver the rover to the Moon.”
Not the first time
This isn't the first time NASA has had to cancel planned missions due to delays or cost overruns. But cancellation decisions are usually made early on. That's what happened with the Resource Prospector lunar rover, which gave the VIPER rover a neutron detector. In such cases, uninvested funds are redirected to more successful NASA projects and initiatives.
So, in 1970 there were cancelled three Apollo lunar missions at once — 18, 19, and 20. The decision on them was due to budget constraints and the reallocation of resources to new programs. Another reason was safety concerns: the Apollo 13 accident almost ended in disaster. This forced NASA to devote more attention and resources to mission safety. Later, the US shifted its focus from lunar programs to solving problems on Earth and developing new space programs — for example, space shuttles.
When a spacecraft is in the final stages of development, NASA does everything it can to see the project through to completion. Canceling a mission at this stage not only ruins the efforts of many engineers and scientists, but also causes financial and resource losses. The VIPER case, when a completed spacecraft has to be dismantled, is the first of its kind. Hopefully, the last. Now the sequestration knife is hanging over the epochal Mars Sample Return Mission (MSR) – don't do that!
