31.10.2024

The project scientist for NASA’s VIPER lunar rover said today the spacecraft has successfully completed all of its pre-launch tests, but its future remains uncertain. NASA intends to terminate the mission even though it is completely built because of concerns about potential future cost overruns. NASA invited other organizations to submit proposals to take over the program as long as there is no further cost to the agency and is evaluating them to determine if there is a path forward.

On July 17, NASA announced its intent to terminate VIPER, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, that is designed to roam around the lunar South Pole for 100 days searching for water ice with scientific instruments and a 1-meter (3.3-foot) drill.

The VIPER rover undergoing vibration testing at Johnson Space Center. Credit: presentation by Anthony Colaprete at the NASA Exploration Science Forum, July 23, 2024. Screengrab.

VIPER is a NASA rover, but it was to be delivered to the Moon by a commercial company, Astrobotic. NASA purchases lunar landing services through its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative rather than building, owning and launching lunar landers itself. NASA pays the companies to deliver science and technology payloads to the lunar surface. The companies are expected to find other customers to close their business cases.

Astrobotic’s first CLPS mission in January 2024 with its small Peregrine lander didn’t reach the Moonbecause of a propulsion failure, however. They are building a larger lander, Griffin, that was to deliver VIPER, but they need to make changes to Griffin because of the Peregrine failure.

Joel Kearns, who leads the CLPS initiative for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, explained in July that those changes would delay the mission at least until September 2025 and boost the cost to $609.6 million. The cost had already grown from $250 million to $505.4 million due to a variety of factors including supply chain issues during COVID.

NASA’s concern is that Griffin won’t be ready by September 2025 either and the cost will keep growing.

However, Kearns said NASA only expects to save $84 million by cancelling VIPER and it will still pay Astrobotic the $323 million through the CLPS contract even though VIPER will not be on Griffin whenever it does go to the Moon. In total NASA will have spent about $1 billion.

At the time of the decision to cancel the program, VIPER had already completed vibration testing, the first of three required pre-launch tests. A week later at the Exploration Science Conference, VIPER Project Scientist Anthony Colaprete announced that it also had just cleared acoustic testing.

At a meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) today, Colaprete said VIPER successfully passed thermal vacuum testing on September 16, the last in the series.

No major problems arose during any of the tests and Colaprete exclaimed today that “performance thermally was amazing.”

Nonetheless, VIPER’s future is up in the air.

NASA issued a call for expressions of interest by organizations that might want to take over the project. Kearns spoke at LEAG yesterday and said they received about 50 responses that “ran the gamut” from relatively detailed to those that clearly wouldn’t work. They followed that with a more formal request for information (RFI) for a VIPER “partnership” and now are evaluating 11 proposals.

Kearns did not say yesterday when a decision would be made, only that “we are considering next steps.”

Colaprete said he has not seen the proposals and is waiting to find out what’s next.

“I was firewalled from that whole process, but they were good enough to have headquarters step back and say, OK, what do we do next? … We’re waiting  now for what is the forward plan for VIPER. Does it stay in long term storage? Does it go with a flight partner that responded to the RFI via an RFP [Request for Proposals] process or something else? And the question of foreign space agency  involvement too is still open, I think.” — Tony Colaprete

NASA noted from the beginning that Congress needs to weigh in on the decision.  During the Senate Appropriations Committee’s markup of the FY2025 Commerce-Justice-Science bill that includes NASA, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) asked her colleagues to consider ways to repurpose the lander. FY2025 appropriations have not progressed any further since then.

In addition, on September 6, the bipartisan leadership of the House Science, Space, and Technology (SS&T) Committee and its space subcommittee wrote a five page letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson asking a series of questions. House SS&T is an authorization committee, not appropriations, so can’t provide any funding, but does set policy.

Kearns said NASA responded to the letter in September and he was not aware that NASA had received any further questions.

Quelle: Space and Technology Policy