WASHINGTON — NASA expects to find out by early next yr the following steps for a lunar rover mission it canceled in July amid some confusion over the timing of that call.
Speaking at an Oct. 28 meeting of the Lunar Exploration Evaluation 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 looking for alternative uses for its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) spacecraft.
NASA issued the RFI after a call announced in July to cancel the mission, whose launch had slipped to no sooner than September 2025 on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. The agency said then it will solicit expressions of interest from organizations eager about taking up the nearly complete rover.
“We got about 50 expressions of interest, which I’ll let you know ranged the gamut from relatively detailed and logically and well-thought-out ideas to simply either things that didn’t look very logical or, bluntly, individuals who said they would really like to get VIPER because they would really 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 following RFI. “At once we’re considering next steps: what it will take to place a partnership in place,” he said, but declined to offer additional details. A NASA spokesperson said Oct. 30 that NASA is determining which responses to the RFI warrant looking for more information, and “propose next steps by early 2025.”
Kearns didn’t say what number of 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 method and has not seen any of the responses. “But I believe they were ok to have headquarters step back and say, ‘OK, what can 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 present in environmental testing, which was just getting underway when NASA made the cancelation decision. “I’ll you let you know that basically, spacecraft development system-level environmental testing does uncover problems that do have to be corrected, which might take more money and time,” Kearns said on the July briefing to announce the choice.
Nonetheless, Colaprete said that VIPER has accomplished each launch environmental tests and thermal vacuum tests with none major issues. “I’ve been an element of a lot of flight thermal-vac test campaigns, and this one was just absolutely incredible in how well it went,” he said. “Every little thing looks great thus far.”
Current plans call for VIPER to enter long-term storage on the Johnson Space Center, where it went through testing, around the start of the brand new yr 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 so as to add a brand new wrinkle to the timeline of NASA’s decision to cancel VIPER. “As you all know, in January our lunar delivery plans modified,” he said. “Following the Peregrine anomalies, it was decided by headquarters that we’d not be flying on Griffin 1.”
That was a reference to Astrobotic’s first lunar lander mission, Peregrine, which encountered an issue with its propulsion systems hours after launch that prevented the spacecraft from attempting a lunar landing. The spacecraft as an alternative flew out to lunar distances before returning to Earth and reentering every week and a half after launch.
Nonetheless, on the time of the lack of Peregrine, and for months later, NASA didn’t announce that it had taken VIPER off Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. At a briefing just after the top of the Peregrine mission, Kearns said that NASA would wait for the outcomes of the Peregrine investigation before making any changes within the award, through the Industrial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, to fly VIPER on Griffin. Astrobotic released the outcomes of that review in August, greater than a month after NASA announced the choice to cancel VIPER.
A NASA spokesperson said Nov. 4, in response to an Oct. 30 inquiry, that the choice to not fly VIPER on Griffin got here 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 can either fly a mass simulator or other payloads identified by Astrobotic.
Along with 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 yr 2025 spending bill. In early September the bipartisan leadership of the House Science Committee sent a letter to NASA with questions on VIPER and NASA’s decision to cancel it.
“NASA’s decision to terminate a virtually accomplished lunar rover and use the total 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 of their letter. The questions they posed to NASA within the letter range from costs related to VIPER to what other methods NASA plans to make use of to gather the information that the mission would have gathered on water ice deposits on the lunar south pole.
Kearns said on the LEAG meeting that NASA did reply to those questions in September and has not received any follow-up inquiries from the committee. He didn’t disclose details concerning the responses NASA provided.
