NASA Cancels VIPER Lunar Rover, Citing Schedule And Cost Issues

Scientists were shocked by NASA’s sudden cancellation of the Resource Prospector mission in 2018, a program designed to follow up on findings of water ice on the Moon with a sophisticated rover to scout the surface.

A year later, NASA made good on its pledge to repurpose the instruments in a new mission known as the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), which so far has cost the agency about $450 million. NASA committed another $322 million to Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic for Earth-to-Moon transportation services aboard the company’s upcoming Griffin lunar lander.

• Industry is invited to take over the program
• The agency retains the contract for Astrobotic lunar transport

VIPER is fully assembled at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, but the rover will not progress to system-level environmental testing as planned. NASA said on July 17 neither VIPER nor the Griffin lander would be ready to fly in 2024. At least $84 million would be needed to delay launch to the fall of 2025, when both vehicles are expected to be ready. However, if VIPER were not to fly by November 2025, the mission would have to be postponed another 9-12 months to accommodate lighting conditions at the lunar south pole and allow for direct communications with Earth. “That would incur even more cost to the government for a later mission,” Joel Kearns, NASA deputy associate administrator for exploration, told reporters during a conference call.

VIPER, a 900-lb., solar-powered spacecraft about the size of a small car, was designed to spend 100 days studying the origin and distribution of water on the Moon and help determine how to harvest resources for human exploration. Its instruments include a 3.3-ft.-long drill and a quadrupole mass spectrometer.

VIPER also was intended as a pathfinder for mission operations in extreme low temperatures, dynamic lighting conditions and rugged terrain, as well as for power-generation and storage technologies, NASA said. The VIPER launch and lander were contracted through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which includes Astrobotic as a vendor. 

Initially, the VIPER mission was budgeted at $433.5 million with a planned arrival at the Moon in late 2023. The projected cost has risen to $505.4 million with a change in the planned landing to late 2024 to enable additional propulsive testing of the Griffin lander. Further assessments of prelaunch activities have projected an increase in mission cost to $609.6 million, with a launch in late 2025.

The cost and schedule issues that prompted VIPER’s cancellation are tied in part to COVID-19-related supply chain delays for critical components, NASA added.

“Decisions like this, of course, are never easy, and we’ve not made this one in any way lightly,” Nicola Fox, NASA Science Mission Directorate associate administrator, told reporters. “But in this case, the projected remaining expenses of VIPER would result in either having to cancel or disrupt many other missions in our CLPS portfolio. Therefore, we made the decision to forgo the VIPER mission in order to be able to sustain the entire program.”

VIPER’s cancellation will delay—but not end—NASA efforts to assess the lunar south pole for the presence of subsurface water, a potentially valuable resource for sustaining human presence on the Moon.

The agency plans to remove the VIPER science instruments for reassignment to future missions, which could include CLPS landers, Artemis astronaut missions and future Lunar Terrain Vehicle operations functioning in an automated mode.

NASA intends to maintain its $323 million contract with Astrobotic for the initial lunar launch of the Griffin lander with a mass simulator instead of VIPER. Astrobotic also will fly commercial payloads on the lander, which was targeted to launch in late 2025.

NASA mulled swapping VIPER for science payloads, but Griffin was designed to deploy the rover and does not have the power and communications needed for the type of fixed payloads the agency considered. “We believe that if we were to ask Astrobotic to make changes like that, it would further delay their schedule,” Kearns said.

VIPER could rise again. NASA issued a solicitation for proposals from industry and international partners for use of the instrumented VIPER system without additional government funding. Responses are due Aug. 1.