(Washington) NASA announced Wednesday that it was ending development of its Viper rover, which was to explore the Moon’s South Pole in search of water, because costs had become too high.
The US space agency has already spent $450 million on the rover, which was originally supposed to cost just over $430 million. The launch, which was originally scheduled for late 2023, could now not take place until 2025 at the earliest, which would have brought its total cost to more than $600 million.
The decision to cancel the mission, with the rover already assembled, is “very difficult,” Nicola Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said at a news conference.
NASA has announced that it is launching a call for industrial or international partners potentially interested in the rover. Otherwise, the space agency plans to dismantle it, to recover certain components – instruments, batteries, solar panels, etc.
The rover was to take off aboard a lunar lander named Griffinbuilt by the young American company Astrobotic, whose first take-off to the Moon in January was not conclusive.
Astrobotic’s second mission is maintained, and NASA will deliver for it an object of a mass similar to the rover, but without scientific utility. The lunar lander was in fact designed according to this constraint, and the space agency does not want to risk further delaying the takeoff by imposing a new scientific cargo. The goal now is to ensure that Astrobotic can accomplish a lunar landing.
The company said Wednesday it is targeting takeoff in the third quarter of 2025.
NASA has contracts with several companies to send hardware and technology to the Moon – a program called CLPS of which Astrobotic is a part.
The goal is to study the lunar environment in preparation for the return of humans to its surface. Water found there could potentially be used.
NASA said copies of three Viper instruments would be included on other missions.
A CLPS mission scheduled to launch later this year, named IM-2 and led by the company Intuitive Machines, is also scheduled to go to the South Pole and drill into the lunar soil.
Finally, the rover that will carry astronauts to the Moon in the future will be able to reach areas that never see sunlight, which are more likely to contain water, by “the end of the decade,” according to Joel Kearns, a senior NASA official.
“We believe that over time we will be able to achieve the scientific objectives that we initially identified for Viper,” he said.