NASA Cancels VIPER Lunar Lander Mission

Over the last few years, NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program has been featured here several times, because, well, it's a rare smart program that does good things. The purpose of the CLPS program is to use private companies to send small- and medium-size landers to the Moon's surface for primarily science-based missions. That particular article references both the CLPS program and the particular example, the VIPER mission that has been cancelled. 

The accepted 50/50 risk of throwing the money away, and small budget probes starts to look different if the probe is bigger budget, and more important.  Then VIPER, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover came to the top of the list of missions NASA really wanted, and Zurbuchen oversaw rewarding a start-up company called Astrobotic a $200 million dollar contract to design, build, and launch the probe to the south pole by 2023.  In a lunar lander they still haven't flown.  

This is an important scientific mission tasked with searching for ice at the south pole and using a one-meter drill to prospect for subsurface samples. The total value of the mission is $660 million, and it matters to scientists and NASA's human exploration division, which hopes to send astronauts to the south pole in the 2020s.

Note the reference to "a lunar lander they still haven't flown" was in April of '22.  The lander was Astrobotic's Peregrine lander which suffered a mission ending accident back in January.

The decision to axe the VIPER mission was announced Wednesday, July 17 in a teleconference; cancelling the program is expected to save the agency an additional $84 million in development costs. NASA has spent about $450 million on the program so far.  The last mentioned launch date for Viper was "in 2025". It appears VIPER will be scrapped for parts or potentially sold to industry. 

Despite the cancellation, NASA leadership stressed that the program was successful thus far and that the termination was solely a budgetary concern.

"We were very confident in the VIPER team. This really gets down to cost and a very constrained budget environment in the United States," said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA headquarters in Washington, during today's teleconference.

Reading between the lines a little gives me the perspective that Artemis and SLS are sucking up all the money available. It was only a week ago, after all, that we ran Yet Another Story of Congress lecturing NASA on getting costs out of the SLS program. Some bright morons in congress think if they can just get "other customers" to adopt SLS the system will magically get cheaper instead of bankrupting other agencies. "Misery loves company!"

NASA's VIPER robotic moon rover stands taller than ever after engineers integrated its mast in a clean room at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston.  (Image credit: NASA/Helen Arase Vargas)