NASA Scraps $450 Million Viper Lunar Mission, Dashing Hopes for Ice Exploration

NASA has decided to halt a $450 million initiative designed to chart water ice on the lunar surface, citing budget overruns and delays in scheduling.

This initiative, known as Viper — the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover — was initially set to launch aboard Astrobotic’s second lunar lander mission in the forthcoming year. The rover aimed to undertake a 100-day exploration to survey and analyze water ice on the moon utilizing a 1-meter drill. It would have marked NASA’s inaugural mission to map resources beyond Earth.

The presence of water is crucial for future human endeavors in space. Despite previous NASA missions confirming water on the lunar surface, the specifics about the distribution and state of this vital resource — such as whether it exists in the form of ice crystals or molecules fused with lunar soil — remain unclear. NASA intended to leverage the insights gained from the Viper mission to guide the selection of landing zones for manned missions to the moon as part of its Artemis program.

Moreover, the data from the Viper mission would have been beneficial not only to NASA but also to various emerging companies eyeing lunar mining and prospecting, especially those planning to utilize moon-harvested water ice as rocket fuel, thereby facilitating extended stays on the moon or serving as a pitstop en route to Mars.

The mission’s design encompassed significant complexities, including deploying Viper to the moon’s eternally shadowed regions, amongst the coldest in the solar system, and managing its operation from Earth with considerable reliance on computer simulations for navigation. Given the unknowns about the soil composition in these areas, the rover was being engineered to adapt to various environments. Moreover, to surmount the challenges posed by the moon’s lengthy nights, it was critical for the rover to land during the lunar South Pole’s “summer season.”

Technical hurdles aside, delivering the mission to the lunar surface was to be undertaken via Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, within NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. This represented a gamble on delivering a substantial, cost-intensive payload on a yet-to-be-proven lander, especially following the failure of Astrobotic’s maiden lunar mission with the smaller Peregrine lander, which did not complete its journey to the moon earlier in the year.

Originally scheduled for a late 2023 launch, the mission faced delays pushing its timeline to the fourth quarter of this year, and then further to September 2025. Despite the cancellation of Viper, the Griffin lander mission is expected to proceed as planned during the same period.

“The continuation of VIPER would have led to increased expenses, jeopardizing other missions under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services,” according to a statement by NASA in a press release.

Although the 1,000-pound rover was fully constructed, it did not complete its pre-launch testing. By terminating the program, NASA anticipates saving approximately $84 million in development expenses, notwithstanding the $450 million already invested. During a press briefing, Joel Kearns, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration, mentioned the possibility of dismantling Viper to repurpose its scientific instruments and components for future missions. The rover remains available for deployment should any commercial or international partners show interest.