WASHINGTON — NASA expects to determine by early next year the next steps for a lunar rover mission it canceled in July amid some confusion over the timing of that decision.
Speaking at an Oct. 28 meeting of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG), Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said the agency was reviewing responses to a request for information (RFI) the agency issued in August seeking alternative uses for its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) spacecraft.
NASA issued the RFI after a decision announced in July to cancel the mission, whose launch had slipped to no earlier than September 2025 on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. The agency said then it would solicit expressions of interest from organizations interested in taking over the nearly complete rover.
“We got about 50 expressions of interest, which I will tell you ranged the gamut from relatively detailed and logically and well-thought-out ideas to just either things that didn’t look very logical or, bluntly, people who said they would like to get VIPER because they would like the instruments and other high-value components and use them on their missions,” Kearns said. Those responses led NASA to issue a more formal RFI.
NASA is now reviewing the responses to the subsequent RFI. “Right now we are considering next steps: what it would take to put a partnership in place,” he said, but declined to provide additional details. A NASA spokesperson said Oct. 30 that NASA is determining which responses to the RFI warrant seeking 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 talk at LEAG Oct. 29 that NASA got 11 responses. He added he was “firewalled” from the process and has not seen any of the responses. “But I think they were good enough to have headquarters step back and say, ‘OK, what do we do next?’”
One reason NASA gave in July for canceling VIPER was the expectation that the mission, which had already suffered cost increases, would likely experience additional cost overruns and delays from issues found in environmental testing, which was just getting underway when NASA made the cancelation decision. “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,” Kearns said at the July briefing to announce the decision.
However, Colaprete said that VIPER has completed both launch environmental tests and thermal vacuum tests without any major issues. “I’ve been a part of a number of flight thermal-vac test campaigns, and this one was just absolutely incredible in how well it went,” he said. “Everything looks great so far.”
Current plans call for VIPER to go into long-term storage at the Johnson Space Center, where it went through testing, around the beginning of the new year as NASA decides on what to do with the rover. “Hopefully we’ll get some real direction very soon,” he said.
Colaprete, in his presentation, appeared to add a new wrinkle to the timeline of NASA’s decision to cancel VIPER. “As you all know, in January our lunar delivery plans changed,” he said. “Following the Peregrine anomalies, it was decided by headquarters that we would not be flying on Griffin 1.”
That was a reference to Astrobotic’s first lunar lander mission, Peregrine, which encountered a problem with its propulsion systems hours after launch that prevented the spacecraft from attempting a lunar landing. The spacecraft instead flew out to lunar distances before returning to Earth and reentering a week and a half after launch.
However, at the time of the loss of Peregrine, and for months later, NASA did not announce that it had taken VIPER off Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. At a briefing just after the end of the Peregrine mission, Kearns said that NASA would wait for the results of the Peregrine investigation before making any changes in the award, through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, to fly VIPER on Griffin. Astrobotic released the results of that review in August, more than a month after NASA announced the decision to cancel VIPER.
A NASA spokesperson said Nov. 4, in response to an Oct. 30 inquiry, that the decision not to fly VIPER on Griffin came during a termination review for the rover mission in late June. NASA has retained the CLPS task order with Astrobotic for the Griffin mission and will either fly a mass simulator or other payloads identified by Astrobotic.
In addition to NASA’s ongoing review of RFI responses, a reprieve for VIPER could come from Congress, which could direct and fund NASA to fly the mission as originally planned in a final fiscal year 2025 spending bill. In early September the bipartisan leadership of the House 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 firm fixed price contract with the CLPS provider to launch dead weight in lieu of VIPER raises serious questions,” the members wrote in their letter. The questions they posed to NASA in the letter range from costs associated with VIPER to what other methods NASA plans to use to collect the data that the mission would have gathered on water ice deposits at the lunar south pole.
Kearns said at the LEAG meeting that NASA did respond to those questions in September and has not received any follow-up inquiries from the committee. He did not disclose details about the responses NASA provided.