Engineers on canceled moon vehicle remaining with NASA

More than 95 percent of the employees working on NASA’s recently canceled lunar rover still work for the space agency, officials said Friday.

The much-anticipated rover, called Resource Prospector, was abruptly canceled in April, just a few years before it was slated to rocket to the moon in search of water. The decision 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.

The space agency has since announced it will rely on commercial companies for future robotic missions to the lunar surface — missions that will use parts from the canceled rover, such as its ice drill, a system to search for hydrogen below the lunar surface, and a tool to quantify water extracted from the moon. But this decision wasn’t made until the agency had spent more than four years and almost half of the project’s $250 million budget.

There were 90 civil servant and contract employees working on the rover when the proj- ect was canceled. They primarily worked across three NASA centers: Johnson Space Center in Houston, Ames Research Center in California and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, spokeswoman Cheryl Warner said.

Two months later, 86 of those workers are still with the agency, Warner said. Those individuals now work on projects including the Internation- al Space Station, the Mars 2020 rover and the minispace station orbiting the moon proposed in Trump’s 2019 budget, she added.

Of the four individuals no longer with the agency, Warner said three decided to leave NASA “for other opportunities” and one decided to retire.

Before its cancellation, Resource Prospector was slated to fly in 2022 or 2023. Now, NASA officials are saying they think commercial partners could get a robotic mission to the moon as early as next year. These partners have not yet been announced, but officials said they plan to award several contracts throughout the next decade.

Brett Coomer / Houston Chronicle Bill Bluethmann talks about the Resource Prospector 2015, a rover prototype now canceled, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston in 2017.