by WASHINGTON — NASA expects to determine the next steps early next year for a lunar rover mission it canceled in July amid some confusion over the timing of that decision.
At an Oct. 28 Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) meeting, Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the agency was reviewing responses to a request for information (RFI) that the agency had issued in August. looking for alternative uses for its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) spacecraft.
NASA issued the RFI following a decision announced in July to cancel the mission, the launch of which had been pushed back to no earlier than September 2025 on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. The agency said at the time that it would solicit expressions of interest from organizations interested in acquiring the nearly complete rover.
“We received about 50 expressions of interest, which I will tell you ranged from relatively detailed, logical and well-thought-out ideas to things that didn’t look very logical, or, frankly, people saying they would like to get VIPER because they would like to have the instruments and other high-end components and use them on their missions,” Kearns said. Those responses prompted NASA to issue a more formal RFI.
NASA is now reviewing responses to the subsequent RFI. “Right now we are considering the next steps: what it will take to establish a partnership,” he said, declining to provide further details. A NASA spokesperson said Oct. 30 that NASA will determine which responses to the RFI require requesting more information, and “propose next steps by early 2025.”
Kearns did not say how many RFI responses the agency received, but Anthony Colaprete, VIPER project scientist, said in a separate speech at LEAG on Oct. 29 that NASA received 11 responses. He added that he was “firewalled” from the process and did not see any response. “But I think they were good enough for the corporate office to step back and say, ‘Okay, what do we do now?’”
One reason NASA gave in July for canceling VIPER was the expectation that the mission, which had already faced cost increases, would likely face additional cost overruns and delays due to problems found in environmental testing, which just ended. were underway when NASA made the cancellation decision. “I will tell you that environmental testing in spacecraft development generally reveals problems that need to be corrected, which would require more time and money,” Kearns said at the July briefing to announce the decision .
However, Colaprete said VIPER completed both the launch environmental tests and thermal vacuum tests without major problems. “I’ve participated in a number of in-flight thermal vacuum test campaigns, and this one was absolutely incredible in how well it went,” he said. “So far everything looks great.”
Current plans call for VIPER to be stored at Johnson Space Center around the start of the new year, where it was tested, while NASA decides what to do with the rover. “Hopefully we’ll get some real direction soon,” he said.
In his presentation, Colaprete seemed to add a new wrinkle to the timeline of NASA’s decision to cancel VIPER. “As you all know, our January lunar delivery plans have changed,” he said. “After the Peregrine anomalies, it was decided by headquarters that we would not fly Griffin 1.”
That was a reference to Astrobotic’s first lunar lander mission, Peregrine, which experienced a problem with its propulsion systems hours after launch that prevented the spacecraft from attempting a lunar landing. The spacecraft instead flew to lunar distances before returning to Earth and re-entering a week and a half after launch.
However, at the time of Peregrine’s loss, and for months afterwards, NASA did not announce that it had pulled VIPER from Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. At a briefing just after the end of the Peregrine mission, Kearns said NASA would wait for the results of the Peregrine study before making any changes to the award, through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, to VIPER to fly at Griffin. Astrobotic published the results of that assessment in August, more than a month after NASA announced the decision to cancel VIPER.
A NASA spokesperson said on Nov. 4, in response to an Oct. 30 inquiry, that the decision not to fly VIPER at Griffin came during a review of the rover mission termination in late June. NASA has retained the CLPS task assignment at Astrobotic for the Griffin mission and will operate either a mass simulator or other payloads identified by Astrobotic.
In addition to NASA’s continued review of RFI responses, a reprieve for VIPER could come from Congress, which could direct and fund NASA to execute the mission as originally planned in a final budget year 2025. In early September, House bipartisan leadership sent Science Committee sent a letter to NASA with questions about VIPER and NASA’s decision to cancel it.
“NASA’s decision to terminate a nearly completed lunar rover and use the full value of the fixed-price contract with the CLPS provider to launch a dead weight instead of VIPER raises serious questions,” wrote the members in their letter. The questions they asked NASA in the letter range from the costs associated with VIPER to what other methods NASA plans to use to collect the data the mission would have collected on water ice deposits at the moon’s south pole.
Kearns said at the LEAG meeting that NASA responded to these questions in September and did not receive any follow-up questions from the committee. He did not reveal details about the answers NASA provided.
