NASA has announced it is scrapping its plans to send a rover to the moon. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, project was intended to search the moon’s polar regions for water, but will now be shelved due to budget issues. Originally slated to land on the moon in December 2022, the project had been delayed several times, and the most recent update was that it would not be ready until September 2025.
Rather than waiting even longer and spending more money, NASA has decided to call it quits on the program due to increasing costs. The rover will now be disassembled so its instruments can be used in other moon missions.
NASA stressed that it was still committed to lunar exploration and that the cutting of this mission was necessary for other mission to continue. The rover was set to be launched as part of a program called CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) in which the agency works with private companies to launch moon missions.
“We are committed to studying and exploring the moon for the benefit of humanity through the CLPS program,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, in a statement. “The agency has an array of missions planned to look for ice and other resources on the moon over the next five years. Our path forward will make maximum use of the technology and work that went into VIPER, while preserving critical funds to support our robust lunar portfolio.”
Other missions in the CLPS program include Astrobotic’s lunar lander, which landed on the moon’s surface earlier this year, and similar landers being developed by companies including Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, and Lockheed Martin. Astrobotic is also working on a lander called Griffin Mission One, which was originally intended to deliver VIPER to the moon’s surface, and will now fly without the rover. NASA said that the contract with Astrobotic will continue, and that the launch and landing of the mission will be an important flight test of the lander’s capabilities.
As for the original aim of the rover to investigate water at the moon’s south pole, NASA says that work will now be done by future instruments that will be a part of crewed missions such as the planned Artemis missions, which aim to see astronauts on the moon’s surface by 2026.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.