By early 2024, NASA had made significant progress on its ambitious lunar exploration project, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER). NASA unveiled VIPER in 2019 as a solution to a costly space exploration challenge: the expense of launching heavy materials, particularly water, into space. On July 17th, following a comprehensive internal review, NASA abruptly announced the project’s cancellation.
Within two weeks, NASA also terminated the Chandra X-ray Observatory program. These program cuts are symptomatic of a broader pattern of budgetary challenges and planning issues as NASA faces a billion-dollar shortfall in science funding.
VIPER was tasked with an exceptionally challenging job. Its mission was to explore the lunar South Pole—a region of the moon that remains perpetually dark, with unstable terrain and temperatures that fluctuate 500°F—to find ice, hydrogen deposits, and create a map of the lunar surface. Partially repurposed from the Resource Prospector rover that was scrapped in 2018, VIPER was intended as a platform for a drill and three instruments that would determine if water and other materials were present.
VIPER was part of a new program for NASA, the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS). In CLPS, commercial companies take charge of constructing robotic lunar landers and securing launch services to transport payloads. NASA’s role is limited to supplying payloads, like VIPER, and then buying the delivery services. Importantly, VIPER was to be the largest and heaviest payload to be delivered by a commercial partner. NASA selected Astrobotic, one of the CLPS providers, to deliver VIPER to the Moon’s surface via its lunar lander Griffin, expecting it to be more cost-effective than a NASA-built lander.
VIPER was initially announced in 2019 at a cost of $250 million, which meant that it was designated a major project, requiring special oversight by Congress. Once the project reached the final design and fabrication stage, the project’s formal cost commitment was set at $433.5 million. In 2023, costs rose to $505.4 million. All the while, launch dates kept being pushed back from 2023 to 2024 and finally to 2025. By the time of its cancellation, total project costs were estimated around $609.6 million.
NASA has been tight lipped about what happened, an all-too-common tendency of the agency. The best information comes from NASA’s Inspector General (IG), including an April 2022 report about VIPER, IG-22-010, and a June 2024 report about CLPS, IG-24-013.
Reading these reports, it’s clear that VIPER was just too big of a project for CLPS. The CLPS program was designed to support the Artemis moon mission through incremental progress, focusing on quickly demonstrating success for small payloads of 10kg to 15kg. VIPER, at approximately 500kg, represented a massive leap in payload size. This significant increase necessitated considerable design changes, adding costs and risks to the project. Since VIPER was also a major project, NASA added more testing, again raising costs. In comparison, the tally for the other 52 payloads in CLPS sums to $245.5 million.
On top of this, NASA selected a lander before finalizing VIPER’s design. In October 2021, when VIPER completed its critical design review, several issues were identified, which necessitated modifications to the Astrobotic CLPS task order that consequently increased cost.
Most importantly, CLPS was a new approach from NASA, which meant there was a bigger risk of the lunar lander being delayed. NASA failed to incorporate these risks in the 2021 cost estimate of $433.5 million, which, as the IG report explained, “included development of the rover, science instruments, lunar operations, and applicable cost reserves but not costs for Astrobotic’s launch and delivery services.” By July 2022, delays in the lander development had “caused a mission delay of a year and an additional $64 million in VIPER development costs, as well as adding $67.8 million to the cost of the CLPS task order.”
Because lunar landers are a new market, there have been supply constraints and technological development challenges. Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lander, which shares multiple systems with Griffin, failed its test, raising concerns about Griffin’s reliability, pushing NASA to require more assurances. The IG estimates that these NASA-led changes added at least $171.4 million to the final bill.
In the end, NASA worried that VIPER’s additional costs would threaten “cancellation or disruption to other CLPS missions” and so VIPER was shelved. But all is not lost. The agency has solicited proposals from private firms, so it might still launch. Astrobotic will still fly the delayed Griffin mission even though VIPER has been canceled. And NASA is pursuing alternative methods to accomplish many of VIPER’s goals, including the launch of the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) later this year. Still, VIPER is emblematic of NASA’s struggles with cost overruns and schedule delays. The future of US space leadership depends on overcoming these persistent obstacles.
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