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After Spending $450 Million, NASA Scraps Moon Rover
The Epoch Times | July 18, 2024 | Bill Pan

NASA has canceled its plan to land a robotic rover on the Moon to search for ice and other potential resources, after spending $450 million.

The plan involved landing what is dubbed the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, near the lunar South Pole, which scientists suspect may harbor ice.

It was planned for the mobile robot to spend 100 days scouting the area for ice deposits and producing a first-ever resource map, which NASA said was critical for its future Artemis missions to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon’s surface.

The decision to axe the VIPER project was announced on July 17 at a press call [after the assassination attempt on Trump failed], with the space agency citing increased costs, delayed launch dates, and worries that future cost hikes could threaten its multi-billion-dollar program to hire private companies to deliver scientific instruments to the Moon. The VIPER was initially planned to be launched in late 2023 aboard a lander provided by Astrobotic Technology, but in 2022, NASA pushed the schedule back to late 2024 to provide more time for testing, the agency said. Since then, additional schedule and supply chain delays further pushed VIPER’s readiness date to September 2025.

In terms of costs, NASA said it has so far spent about $450 million on the program. Discontinuing VIPER is expected to save the agency at least $84 million in development and additional operational costs.

NASA officials stressed that the cancellation was due to a budgetary issue, not a technological one.