NASA: Rover project ‘too limited’
Workers to be reassigned; review will determine future of lunar vehicle
NASA leadership plans to reassign all 90 government employees working on the space agency’s recently canceled lunar rover to “other opportunities within the agency” when work ends this month.
The much-anticipated rover, called Resource Prospector, was canceled April 23 — the same day Jim Bridenstine was sworn in as NASA’s new administrator.
The $250 million rover was being built to learn more about the availability of water on the moon. Much of the work on the mission, slated to fly in 2022 or 2023, was being done at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The agency’s abrupt cancellation of the rover stunned scientists and researchers alike, especially given the recent push by President Donald Trump’s administration to return Americans to the moon as a stepping stone for Mars.
But the agency said earlier this month that Resource Prospector no longer suited its exploration campaign, bringing an end to the three-year proj-
ect. If an independent review of the cancellation confirms NASA’s decision, the rover will be scrapped for parts.
“This project was intended as a one-time effort to explore a specific location on the Moon, and as designed, now is too limited in scope for the agency’s expanded lunar exploration focus,” NASA said in a May 3 announcement. “NASA’s return to the Moon will include many missions to locate, extract and process elements across bigger areas of the lunar surface.”
Cheryl Warner, a NASA spokeswoman, told the Houston Chronicle on Wednesday that “selected instruments from the mission concept will fly on early Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions to the moon.”
The review is expected to conclude at the end of the month, Warner said. But the agency appears to already be looking for new rover ideas.
On April 27, NASA announced that it was looking for proposal ideas from the U.S. commercial space industry for new technologies to deliver payloads to the moon.
“This request for Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) will further expand efforts to support development and partnership opportunities on the lunar surface,” the space agency’s website post stated. “Using these services, the agency will accelerate a robotic return to moon, with upcoming missions targeted for two to three years earlier than previously planned.”
NASA went on to say that lunar surface missions were expected to begin as soon as 2019, with the first surface delivery slated for no later than Dec. 31, 2021.
Since taking office, Trump has made it clear that returning to the moon for the first time since 1972 is a priority for his administration. He revived the defunct National Space Council last year and, later, signed Space Policy Directive-1 urging NASA to return Americans to the moon.
Earlier this year, the president released a $19.9 billion NASA budget proposal for the coming fiscal year that tasks NASA with launching the first flight without a crew for Orion — the spacecraft meant to take humans to Mars — by 2022, followed by a launch of Americans around the moon in 2023. NASA officials hope to launch the uncrewed flight in December 2019, but that will likely slip to June 2020 in part because of construction delays for the rocket that will carry Orion into space.
Centers around the country, including Johnson, already are working diligently to reach these deadlines.
Additionally, Trump’s proposal would allow the agency to begin working on the foundation of a Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway, saying it would “give us a strategic presence in the lunar vicinity that will drive our activity with commercial and international partners and help us further explore the moon and its resources and translate that experience toward human missions to Mars.”