NASA’s VIPER rover isn’t going to the moon after all

In November 2019, NASA announced plans to send a new rover to the moon. However, after almost five years and multiple delays, it appears that the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will not launch at all. VIPER was originally planned to land in late 2022 with a mission to search for water at the moon’s south pole. The launch was first delayed until the end of 2023 and beyond again until the end of 2024. As of this week, NASA announced that the project has officially been completed cancelledciting “cost increases, launch date delays and the risks of future cost growth”.

VIPER’s cancellation represents the latest chapter in the rocky history of NASA’s efforts to explore the moon’s polar resources. VIPER was originally planned as a replacement for the Resource Prospector rover, another remotely operated vehicle designed to search for water and other volatiles in the moon’s polar regions. That project was canceled April 2018 while it is still in the preliminary stages, at the agency describes it as “too limited in scope for the agency’s expanded focus on lunar exploration.”

[Related: NASA beamed Missy Elliott’s ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)’ to her favorite planet.]

The presence of water on the moon has been theorized for centuriesand hard evidence of ice in the moon’s polar regions arrived in 2018 with the analysis of data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper. Exactly how much water is present remains unclear. NASA then tried to answer this question, first with Resource Prospector and then with VIPER; the cancellation of the latter means that the answer to this question will have to wait at least a little longer.

When Resource Prospector was canceled, NASA promised to “evolve [that project] to fit into its broader exploration strategy.” The result was VIPER. See you this week, VIPER appeared to be a crucial part of the agency’s lunar exploration strategy; the maps were seen as crucial to establishing a lasting presence on the moon.

Instead of mapping the moon’s south pole, VIPER now appears destined for the same fate as Resource Prospector. NASA again promises to reuse the rover’s instruments on future missions – unless a good offer is made for them, as the agency is also open to supplying the rover to “industry and international partners.”

[Related: There really are moon lava tunnels—and humans may live in them one day.]

At least one of the reasons for VIPER’s delays was that the Griffin lander that would take the rover to the moon – manufactured by Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic—additional tests needed before it is used in the field. Astrobotic won the contract to manufacture the lander through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which allows companies to bid on delivering NASA payloads to the moon, and the risk of cancellation or disruption of CLPS has been cited as a factor in the cancellation of VIPER.

Despite this, NASA maintains that its lunar exploration program remains a high priority; in particular, the agency emphasizes the role of the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1), which will land at the moon’s south pole later this year. Nevertheless, the announcement has drawn criticism The New York Times notice acid that “NASA will spend about $800 million not to send a robot rover to the moon.”