Op-Ed: VIPER’s Sidelining is a Scientific Disaster

For the better part of a decade, NASA’s efforts have been focused on sending an international cadre of humans back to the surface of the Moon, something which has not been undertaken in well over 50 years. This comes at a time where increased pressure from peer-competitor states is once again driving a new, geopolitical Space Race – and one where commercial space enterprise is flourishing. All of the signs are pointing towards success, until you start to look under the hood. 

VIPER, NASA’s 500 million dollar Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, is one of the first victims of a strange political and economic school of thought that has overtaken the agency – with NASA announcing that they would be canceling the mission effective August 1, 2024 amidst schedule concerns on both the lander and rover teams. As I stressed in my 2023 op-ed, NASA has begun to lose their grip on their own goals when it comes to commercialization, becoming not an exploration agency, but an economic middleman who seemingly does not value the work being done on vital projects like VIPER in support of their broader ambitions. The agency, it seems, has shifted their focus towards supporting a self sustaining space industry that as of yet has not come to fruition. What then is the point of exploration, if there are no exploration focused missions to be flown? What will become of these broad ambitions if there is no one left who is willing to fight for them? Make no mistake, the agency is more mobile and ambitious than it has been in nearly 20 years, but it comes at the cost of sacrificial lambs on the altar of economic development.

Before we talk about VIPER, we must discuss an underlying concern that has permeated this program since day one – CLPS. The Commercial Lunar Payload Services Initiative is not so much a program as it is an idea. NASA, in their spin up of this program, casts a wide net; the idea of “build a moon lander” seems to be the only guiding principle for companies to follow. Following the success the commercial market had in LEO with initiatives like Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew, the agency sought to replicate this increase in capability with delivery systems to the lunar surface. This makes rational sense from an external perspective – enabling cargo delivery opens the door for technology maturation across the board, an incredible win for both NASA and the broader space industry.

 Unlike the Human Landing System program, a commercially developed lander program for delivery of Artemis astronauts to the moon, CLPS has no defined guidelines, only size classes and hyper-generalized requirements. Here we find the unique aspect of CLPS’ structure as a whole, the two pronged rationale for its existence. The first prong is fairly straightforward: deliver small-to-medium NASA payloads to the Lunar surface in support of planetary science and Artemis goals. The second is more… nebulous. It is the hope that the establishment of this transportation system will encourage those who want rides to the surface to come forward, and eventually sustain themselves beyond the outflow of cash from the government. While some commercial organizations have partnered with these companies for flashy sponsorships or even memorial services on the moon, the mass economic migration to space shows few signs of happening in the immediate future. Industry as a whole has so far not turned their eyes skywards with the aim of settling the lunar surface, cementing NASA as the program’s biggest benefactor. 

Such is the case more broadly, with governments remaining the primary anchors of complex space activities in the foreseeable future. This remains the operational paradigm with LEO human spaceflight operations, launch industry drivers, and more. While SpaceX’s Dragon has had success finding customers for private tourism missions, the majority of these customers remain government astronauts, flying at the expense of their parent government or agency. Even commercial entities such as Axiom which began as “tourism” focused organizations have pivoted to catering to governments, realizing the value of state-sponsored spaceflight. Cargo spacecraft developed by commercial companies remain at the service of NASA for their own resupply missions to the ISS, a government funded laboratory built from taxpayer dollars. This brings us to a key point: spending money for these kinds of big efforts is a good thing, and enables us to get the job done. This, however, can only be done with a clear vision and a means for execution, something the agency is currently struggling with. With VIPER, it is clear that NASA is hell bent on driving economic change with little regard for how their science missions will fare, an unfortunate rationale that ultimately harms NASA’s broader lunar exploration goals. 

NASA’s cited rationale for the curtailing of VIPER was cost overrun, supply chain issues, and the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, most of the issues leading to VIPER’s termination were rooted in the future, citing long term schedule delays to not only the program itself, but other CLPS payloads. The lander, Astrobotic’s Griffin spacecraft was given a readiness date of 2025, which threatened to shake up the order of CLPS missions currently manifested. NASA, under its current constrained financial environment, made the move to continue to support CLPS in the place of VIPER.  This is the sad reality of this cancellation, one that places the needs of other payloads that are several years down the road in favor of a critical payload that is ready now. The VIPER spacecraft, as of the time of writing, was fully complete, with few technical acceptance tests being left for the system to carry out. Griffin, the lunar lander which would deliver VIPER to the lunar South Pole, encountered significant delays during its development; Astrobotic ultimately announced that the lander would not be ready before 2025. The Griffin spacecraft intended for VIPER, however, will fly without the rover onboard, opting to fill the mass on the lander with a mass simulator. Despite Griffin being the primary driver of this delay, VIPER has ultimately bore the brunt of the programatic consequences. It is easy to see how this became a difficult choice: support the already financially constrained economic program behind CLPS, one that could unlock future capabilities for the agency as the commercial market flourishes, or dump those limited resources into getting the rover across the finish line. The agency chose the former, and made the choice to end the VIPER program. NASA officials, in a press conference on July 17th, expressed their commitment to the CLPS program – a remark that I can only imagine would leave the VIPER team feeling rather scorned.

Now, it is entirely reasonable to be asking yourself: why? Why is it that NASA feels the need to sacrifice a crucial mission in favor of an untested and immature economic system, one in which anchor tenants of this new space economy have not yet materialized? It all comes down to what NASA ultimately wants for the future of space, or perhaps an uncertain vision of said future. Much of the commercialization ethos materialized out of a need to save money and move faster, something that has remained in the background of political and economic discussions about space. This, in theory, would allow the agency to move more resources into bigger and better projects, such as returning to the Moon and moving on to Mars. This has proved a difficult balancing act, with layers of bureaucracy and economic policy clouding the path forward for a sustainable future in space. The balancing act of supporting a nascent economy as well as fostering ambitious exploration goals has led to missteps – with both sides of the equation seemingly out of balance. NASA has recently struggled to maintain political and economic motivation for commercial and government funded missions, with the agency encountering problems executing on both Commercial LEO Development, and the ambitious Mars Sample Return program.

As those of us at Space Scout have stressed in the past, robotic precursor missions remain a vital component of any and all human exploration efforts, most notably VIPER in the schema of Moon to Mars. CLPS is a unique operational paradigm – many of the payloads, excluding VIPER, can operate on their own. While they may act as tech demos, they do not directly support human missions during their operational life. VIPER is different, as it represents a fundamental step required to assess the viability of some of Artemis’ prime landing site candidates, Permanently Shadowed Regions. These cold, permanently dark regions may present themselves as a vital resource for long duration, sustainable space exploration. Within these regions, water ice may be stable and even extractable for use by humans as they venture further into deep space – a key enabler for the prospect of “living off the land.” Without VIPER, we can only rely on data from orbit until humans physically arrive, using the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, KPLO and Lunar Trailblazer as our eyes on the lunar surface. Without this up close investigation, we can only rely on data that has high degrees of uncertainty. While some companies, such as Intuitive Machines have highlighted rocket based mobility, they may pose a risk to the sensitive environment of these permanently shadowed regions – a facet of VIPER’s operation which made it particularly attractive to planetary scientists. In the original plan, VIPER would have landed well outside of these regions, and made the careful traverse into these PSRs, ensuring that that the delicate and pristine environment remained undisturbed.  

Looking further afield, NASA is eager to hand off elements of exploration architecture to commercial entities, enabling more robust planetary science missions – in theory. In practice, the future remains more uncertain. Citing aging infrastructure around the Red Planet, NASA is now looking to replace aging communications and imaging spacecraft with commercially built and operated orbiters – something never before attempted outside of the Earth-Moon system. The difference between CLPS and this commercial infrastructure is drastic; every piece of lost hardware and imposed higher risk places further missions, both crewed and uncrewed, in jeopardy. We cannot risk this vital infrastructure at Mars, just as we cannot skip these vital precursor missions on the Lunar surface. 

The path forward from VIPER’s unfortunate cancellation is somewhat murky, and rests not only in the hands of external players, but at the whims of those who drive policy for the foreseeable future. Should nothing be done by August 1, the spacecraft will be disassembled and stored in pieces, with the instruments onboard potentially flying on landers or rovers that have yet to be developed. This option essentially calls for rebuilding the spacecraft from the ground up, potentially losing some of the specialization that made the system so uniquely suited to exploring PSRs. The second, and frankly less likely option, is that a private or international institution takes the fully completed spacecraft off of NASA’s plate – to land, manage and operate in lieu of the agency. While it gained some attention online, it is my belief that no one organization is immediately ready for this kind of responsibility, especially given the high degree of importance that this mission represents and the timeframes the mission was already operating under. Data from VIPER could not only inform missions like Artemis III and IV but could have long lasting implications for where the program eventually chooses to spend a majority of their time. Now, we are flying blind. This cancellation makes one thing clear: there is a lack of synergy between NASA’s own exploration objectives, and the commercial industry that is being propped up to enable it. The balancing act that NASA has been tasked with maintaining seems to have fallen from their grasp. In light of this, there is now a call going out within the scientific community –  rallying around VIPER in an attempt to get this mission flown, a sentiment I wholeheartedly support. It is unfortunate, however, that the financial environment the agency has found themselves in will likely preclude an immediate solution – without questions of cost and capability.       

When I wrote my first op-ed last year, I had not yet seen what would come of several of these CLPS missions. While I certainly formed my initial judgments based on the outcomes of Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission 1 and Intuitive Machines’ IM-1, I do not think I am ready to make a call now as to the success of the program, but the writing certainly is beginning to appear on the wall. It is, however, imperative that we do not let a nascent program derail the flow of science or lessen the value of exploration in favor of an economic model that may appear. VIPER, throughout its life, has appeared as a key point in various roadmaps for human architecture, helping to direct astronauts on their journey to uncovering key facets of life beyond Earth. NASA has lost their vision here, and while the current circumstances (a constrained financial environment and a desire to support a future vision) align to make the program’s cancellation a necessary decision, that does not make it a good decision. For now, we must live with the consequences should nothing happen by August 1, and hope that VIPER or something like it will ride again; taking us to places we have never thought possible. I am not quite willing to let the spirit of this mission be sacrificed just yet.  

Edited by Beverly Casillas, Scarlet Dominik and Emily B.