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NASA axes its moon rover project VIPER

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NASA’s VIPER – short for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover – sits assembled inside the cleanroom at the agency’s Johnson Space Center.
NASA’s VIPER — short for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover — sits assembled inside the cleanroom at the agency’s Johnson Space Center. NASA

NASA has announced it is scrapping its plans to send a rover to the moon. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, project was intended to search the moon’s polar regions for water, but will now be shelved due to budget issues. Originally slated to land on the moon in December 2022, the project had been delayed several times, and the most recent update was that it would not be ready until September 2025.

Rather than waiting even longer and spending more money, NASA has decided to call it quits on the program due to increasing costs. The rover will now be disassembled so its instruments can be used in other moon missions.

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NASA stressed that it was still committed to lunar exploration and that the cutting of this mission was necessary for other mission to continue. The rover was set to be launched as part of a program called CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) in which the agency works with private companies to launch moon missions.

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“We are committed to studying and exploring the moon for the benefit of humanity through the CLPS program,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, in a statement. “The agency has an array of missions planned to look for ice and other resources on the moon over the next five years. Our path forward will make maximum use of the technology and work that went into VIPER, while preserving critical funds to support our robust lunar portfolio.”

Other missions in the CLPS program include Astrobotic’s lunar lander, which landed on the moon’s surface earlier this year, and similar landers being developed by companies including Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, and Lockheed Martin. Astrobotic is also working on a lander called Griffin Mission One, which was originally intended to deliver VIPER to the moon’s surface, and will now fly without the rover. NASA said that the contract with Astrobotic will continue, and that the launch and landing of the mission will be an important flight test of the lander’s capabilities.

As for the original aim of the rover to investigate water at the moon’s south pole, NASA says that work will now be done by future instruments that will be a part of crewed missions such as the planned Artemis missions, which aim to see astronauts on the moon’s surface by 2026.

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Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
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