Snakebit Rover

VIPER NASA’s VIPER rover is all dressed up but now with almost no chance to fly. (credit: NASA) Snakebit rover by Jeff Foust Monday, July 22, 2024 Bookmark and Share At NASA’s Johnson Space Center, a robotic lunar rover sits, effectively complete and ready for environmental testing after years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on it. But it may never fly to space. That is the situation facing the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission. NASA announced in 2019 its plans to develop VIPER, at the time a $250 million spacecraft projected to launch in 2022 to prospect for water ice in shadowed regions of the lunar poles. It was the successor of sorts to Resource Prospector, another NASA lunar rover mission that the agency cancelled in 2018 after concluding it was “too limited in scope” for NASA’s lunar exploration plans. “The projected remaining expenses for VIPER would have resulted in either having to cancel or disrupt many other missions in our Commercial Lunar Payload Services line,” said Fox. “Therefore, we have made the decision to forgo this particular mission.” VIPER became a more sophisticated, but also more expensive, mission. By the time it was formally confirmed in 2021, its cost had grown to $433.5 million, reflecting greater capabilities and a longer lifetime than first proposed as well as a revised 2023 landing date. That did not include the cost of actually getting VIPER to the Moon, with NASA using its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to select Astrobotic’s Griffin lander for VIPER at an initial, additional cost of $199.5 million. Costs for both, though, had increased while schedules slipped. In 2022, NASA delayed the launch by a year to late 2024 and increased the cost of the CLPS task order by more than 50% to $322 million to perform additional testing of Griffin before its launch. The high value of VIPER, relative to other CLPS missions that carried several payloads that in aggregate cost far less, warranted the change, NASA argued. Many scientists were worried, though, about launching mission like VIPER on an untried lander from a startup. Those concerns only grew after Astrobotic’s smaller Peregrine lander suffered a propellant leak hours after launch in January on the company’s first lunar mission, and the first of the overall CLPS effort. Peregrine never made it to the Moon, reentering a week and a half after launch. That alone would further delay the VIPER launch as Astrobotic and NASA looked into the issues with Peregrine and worked to ensure they did not jeopardize Griffin. Last week, NASA said that it expected Griffin to be ready for a launch in September 2025, nearly a year later than previously planned, a date Astrobotic confirmed. VIPER was running into its own problems. At a briefing last week, agency officials said that the rover had suffered supply chain problems stemming from the pandemic. “The delays occurred over and over for several key components,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. He described VIPER as a “very dense” rover built from the inside out; many of the components that were affected by the supply chain problems were for interior portions of the rover, delaying its assembly. Moreover, he said the nature of the supply chain problems—a series of small delays versus a single large one—made it harder for the project to manage. “They did a really heroic job working through Covid and then through all the supply chain disruptions that came out of Covid,” he said of the VIPER team, but by early this year he said it was clear that the mission would not be ready to launch this year regardless of the status of Griffin. That drove up the cost of VIPER from $505.4 million, a revised cost NASA set after the launch was pushed back to late 2024, to $609.6 million. That exceeded the baseline of $433.5 million set at confirmation by more than 30%, triggering an agency review on whether to continue the mission or terminate it. In that review this summer, NASA elected to terminate VIPER. “In this case, the projected remaining expenses for VIPER would have resulted in either having to cancel or disrupt many other missions in our Commercial Lunar Payload Services line,” said Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science. “Therefore, we have made the decision to forgo this particular mission.” NASA was making a reference to the sunk cost fallacy in its decision to cancel VIPER: just because the agency had spent so much on the rover already—about $450 million spent to date—did not mean it was worth spending many millions more. Kearns said cancelling VIPER now would save at least $84 million. The agency faced questions, though, from reporters on the call and from scientists in the days following the announcement, about why the agency would cancel a mission whose spacecraft that was already built. Scientists argued that VIPER offered opportunities to characterize water ice in permanently shadowed regions that other missions, both landers and orbiters, will not be able to duplicate for years. Kearns suggested that costs for VIPER were likely to grow beyond that new estimate of $609.6 million because the rover was only now beginning environmental tests. “I will you tell you that in general, spacecraft development system-level environmental testing does uncover problems that do need to be corrected, which would take more time and money,” he said. If VIPER did not launch by November 2025, he said, the mission would have to wait another 9 to 12 months for optimal lighting conditions to return to the landing site at the south polar region of the Moon. That would add to the costs of the mission, forcing more hard choices about CLPS and other projects that might need to be sacrificed for VIPER. “We do want to fly quickly but we also want to make a mission that is more impactful than just the lander itself,” Thornton said of Griffin. NASA’s science program has been facing such hard choices for some time because of an overall budget about $1 billion below earlier projections. This Tuesday, around the same time that Kearns is scheduled to discuss the VIPER decision at the NASA Exploration Science Forum conference in St. Louis, the agency’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee will meet to hear what a recent review concluded could be done to cut costs of both the Chandra and Hubble space telescopes, moved that could result in reduced science from both missions. “My budget challenges keep me up at night,” Fox said last week during a presentation at the COSPAR Scientific Assembly in South Korea before the VIPER announcement. The budget caps put in place for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, she said, meant “we’ve had to make some really tough decisions, almost impossible decisions.” “It is tough, and we’ve had to make some terrible, terrible choices over the last year, and we’ve seen the ripples going through the whole community,” she said. “But, we still have $7.3 billion in FY 2024, and we are grateful for every single penny of that.” Repurposing Griffin While NASA announced it was cancelling Griffin, it is keeping the CLPS task order with Astrobotic for the Griffin lander mission. The question is now what will fly on it. Kearns said that the current plan is to fly a mass simulator, an inert payload with the same mass as VIPER, on the lander. That would turn the mission into a technology demonstration of Griffin itself, showing the ability of a larger lander to deliver payloads that could be of use for future CLPS missions or more broadly for Artemis. NASA looked into flying science payloads on Griffin instead, but noted the lander, designed to serve primarily as a landing platform for VIPER and little more, would need changes to host and operate payloads. “We believe that if we were to ask Astrobotic to make changes like that, it would further delay their schedule,” he said. “It would lead to more cost for the government. It would lead to a delay of the demonstration of a successful south pole landing by the large Griffin lander, which we are very interested in seeing.” Astrobotic will also be free to fly commercial payloads on Griffin. “Now we have an opportunity to potentially put some other things on that manifest,” said John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic, in an interview just after the NASA announcement of VIPER’s cancellation. One possibility, he said, is to fly a prototype of the company's LunaGrid power delivery system, which involves vertical solar arrays optimized for working at the south pole of the Moon. “We do want to fly quickly but we also want to make a mission that is more impactful than just the lander itself,” he said, noting that he believed that Griffin could launch next September with a payload of some kind. It has been “a year of tumult and challenge” for the company, Thornton said, with the loss of Peregrine earlier this year. “The VIPER cancellation is “certainly another punch to the gut here, but we’ll roll with it.” The problems with VIPER, coupled with the loss of Peregrine and the off-kilter landing of Intuitive Machines’ first lander, IM-2, in February, have prompted some to reconsider the overall CLPS effort. NASA said it remains committed to the program, with Kearns stating that the next two missions, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and Intuitive Machines’ IM-2, scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of this year, “We and the companies have not yet accrued enough experience to probably understand how to smoothly deliver such a large and sophisticated payload as VIPER to the lunar surface,” said Kearns. Scaling up CLPS to accommodate VIPER, though, may have been premature. He said VIPER required a “large and somewhat unique lander” compared to the smaller CLPS landers, but with the expectation at the time VIPER started that industry would move faster on those smaller landers, building up experience, than what happened. “We originally though in the government that the first landings on the Moon would take place in 2021 and 2022 by CLPS,” he said, but in fact just happened this year. “We and the companies have not yet accrued enough experience to probably understand how to smoothly deliver such a large and sophisticated payload as VIPER to the lunar surface.” There is still a sliver of hope for VIPER: NASA said it will ask for companies and international partners that might want to take over the mission to submit “expressions of interest” by the end of the month. NASA could then hand over the rover to one of them at no cost, allowing them to complete and launch the rover. That, though, would likely require an investment by that new operator of several hundred million dollars to get VIPER itself ready for launch and then arrange for a lander. It’s not clear anyone has both the interest and means to do so. On the sidelines of the Farnborough International Airshow on Monday, Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said he was not aware of any interest by his agency in taking over VIPER, either on its own or as a partner with other agencies or organizations. If NASA cannot find any partners, it will scavenge the instruments on the rover to fly on other missions as well as other valuable components. The rest of the rover would then be scrapped, a reminder of how hard it remains to get back to the surface of the Moon. Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.