NASA cancels $450M Viper moon mission, dashing ice prospecting dreams

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Image Credits: NASA (opens in a new window)

NASA has canceled a $450 million program to map water ice deposits on the moon after cost overruns and scheduling delays.

That program, called Viper — the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover — was scheduled to fly on Astrobotic’s second lunar lander mission next year. The mobile robot was due to conduct a 100-day mission to map lunar ice and use a 1-meter drill to detect and analyze these ice deposits. It would’ve been NASA’s first resource-mapping mission off planet Earth. 

Water will be vital to any human expansion beyond earth. Other NASA missions have helped scientists confirm the presence of water on the moon, but we still don’t have a good understanding of where the most water-rich areas are, or what form the ice is in, like ice crystals or water molecules bonded to soil. The agency said it would use Viper’s findings to inform future landing sites for crewed missions to the moon under its flagship Artemis program.

But it isn’t just NASA that would’ve benefited from the mission data. A number of startups have set their sights on lunar prospecting and mining, with the aim of using naturally harvested water ice as propellant for longer-duration stays on the planet or as a way station to Mars. 

The mission architecture was complex. NASA officials wanted to send Viper into the moon’s permanently shadowed regions, which are some of the coldest areas of the solar system, and operate it in near-real time from Earth relying, in some areas, on only computer simulations for navigation.

The agency doesn’t yet have a good understanding of what the soil in some of these areas is like, so they were designing the rover to operate in a variety of conditions. The solar-powered rover would’ve also been up against the moon’s long nights; due to these conditions, the rover would’ve needed to land on the moon during the start of the lunar “summer season” on the South Pole.

Beyond these technical challenges, the mission was also going to be delivered to the moon using Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, as part of a contract awarded to that company under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. It was a high-stakes, heavy and expensive payload to place on an untested lander; Astrobotic’s first lunar mission, using a smaller lander called Peregrine, launched at the beginning of this year but failed to reach the moon. 

The mission was originally slated to launch in late 2023, but that was pushed to the fourth calendar quarter of this year. NASA officials further delayed it to September 2025. The Griffin lander was independently delayed until the same time frame, and although Viper is canceled, that mission will move forward. 

“Continuation of VIPER would result in an increased cost that threatens cancellation or disruption to other CLPS missions,” NASA said in a press release. 

The 1,000-pound robot has been fully assembled but hasn’t finished pre-flight testing. As a result, NASA will save around $84 million in development costs, officials said during a press conference Wednesday, though the agency has already spent $450 million on the program. 

Joel Kearns, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration, said Wednesday that the agency was looking to take Viper apart and reuse some of its scientific instruments and components on future moon missions, though the rover could still be used as-is if any commercial or international partners express interest. 

Starpath accelerates moon water mining plans with $12M in funding

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Image Credits: Starpath Robotics (opens in a new window)

NASA and the space industry are in agreement: If we want to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, we’ll need to make use of every native resource we can — and none are as important as water ice. 

Starpath Robotics is one of a handful of startups planning for this future. The startup is betting that there will be a thriving market for liquid oxygen (LOX) refined from lunar water ice and that harvesting this resource will be key to humanity’s expansion throughout the solar system. LOX is a crucial component of propellant for some vehicles like rockets and spacecraft like lunar landers, and it’s used as the oxidizer alongside a combustible fuel such as hydrogen, kerosene, or methane.

The company came out of stealth last September with an ambitious water-harvesting architecture, involving mining rovers, refineries and LOX storage systems. Starpath wants to launch a demo mission “as quickly as we possibly can,” CEO Saurav Shroff said in a recent interview. To ensure the hardware will be ready whenever a launch vehicle is available, the company announced today that it has closed a $12 million seed round, co-led by 8VC and Fusion Fund, with participation from Day One Ventures, Balerion Space, and Indicator Ventures.

Much of the architecture has remained the same since Starpath originally unveiled its plans last year: Essentially, the company wants to use fleets of mining rovers that dig up hundreds of tons of lunar dirt and return it to autonomous lunar processing plans that extract the water, splits those molecules into their constituent atoms, and then liquifies the oxygen. The entire system would be powered by a massive solar array that’s being designed in collaboration with space solar startup Solestial.

There are some changes, however. Shroff said the 10-person team has made improvements on the mining rover hardware such that it will take far fewer rovers to produce a 1,000-ton annual harvesting scale (the company originally estimated it would take 50 rovers to hit that rate). Rover development also got a boost with $800,000 in NASA grants, as part of the space agency’s Break the Ice challenge to private industry. There is still much to develop, including the solar array and refineries, but the basic architecture is essentially planned out. With that in place, the company’s been turning its attention to the final interaction between its hardware and the customer’s vehicle. 

Figuring this out means solving a few problems, namely how to transport the LOX to the vehicle, which could be some distance away. The other problem, of course, is how to actually load the vehicle with the product. 

For the first issue, Shroff says the company is simply configuring its dirt-hauling rover to carry pressurized cryogenic propellant tanks instead. For the second, while he declined to go into specifics, he said the rover would be equipped with a specialized refueling instrument, that in all likelihood will be designed on a customer-by-customer basis. 

As of right now, there are few prospective customers for lunar LOX, but those that are planning moon missions could prove to be prolific buyers. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have contracts with NASA to land on the moon before the end of the decade; Shroff estimates that Starship would consume around 100-300 tons of oxygen on the moon per flight, and something like Blue Origin’s Blue Moon would consume tens of tons of oxygen per flight. 

Given that Starpath is aiming to produce around 1,000 tons of LOX per year, regular Starship flights to and from the lunar surface alone could be enough demand to support this production capacity. At that rate, Shroff says, any operator would be able to fly a vehicle to the moon and trust they will be able to refuel it while they’re there. 

By the end of this year, the company is aiming to conduct an end-to-end, full-scale demonstration of its system in a simulated lunar environment, which they’ll build out at their 12,000-square-foot premises. After that, they’ll embark on a series of test campaigns before launching their first demonstration mission. The goal for that first mission is to harvest the equivalent of around 100 tons of liquid oxygen per year. It’s incredibly ambitious: Scientists have confirmed that water ice is on the moon, but no government or company has ever harvested it, let alone refined it in situ.

Starpath is currently at 10 full-time employees, and the new capital will primarily go toward doubling or even tripling that number at a fast pace. The payoff for getting this technology online could be enormous, the company is betting, with the moon just the first stepping stone to expansion through the solar system. Starpath already has its eyes on developing processing plans and rover harvesting fleets for Mars, which would be augmented from their lunar counterparts, to convert CO2 in the Martian atmosphere into methane.

“Life can be multiplanetary in a very short period of time,” Shroff said. “If you make 1,000 tons of liquid oxygen on the moon, your path to making a million-person city on Mars is hard, but it’s now possible.” 

Japan's SLIM mission makes historic moon landing, but its time is running out

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Image Credits: JAXA

Japan’s long-planned Smart Lander for Investigating Moon has successfully touched down on the lunar surface, making the nation the fifth in history to do so. But all is not well for SLIM, which may have a limited lease on life due to trouble with its solar cells.

In a press conference following the early-morning (local time) landing on the moon, the directors of JAXA and the mission explained that “the soft landing was itself successful; SLIM has been communicating and it receiving commands. However, it seems the solar cell is not generating electricity at this point in time.”

Solar cells can be finicky, as can the rest of the electrical workings in a space — let’s be honest, the whole thing is usually pretty finicky — so the team hasn’t yet been able to identify the issue. However, as the other sensors are working correctly and showing healthy values, they feel confident it is limited to the solar cells themselves.

Running on battery is of course not a long-term solution, and if they do not manage to get the cells online, the main lander will only have a few hours of life (and may in fact at this time already be reaching the end of that).

The country and agency must be congratulated on their accomplishment; landing on the moon is no easy feat and indeed multiple nations and private companies have made attempts in the last few years, none of which have succeeded. Something as small as a stuck valve (as in Astrobotic’s recent mission) can derail a lunar bid.

Why valves are a spacecraft engineer’s worst nightmare

There is some speculation based on telemetry that the lander may have tipped or otherwise be in some non-optimal physical configuration, but so far JAXA does not have any confirmation of this. The initial press conference was primarily to announce the initial success of a soft landing and functioning lunar lander.

The team did note, however, that the two Lunar Excursion Vehicles carried by SLIM appear to have successfully deployed. These two sub-craft popped off the main vehicle while it hovered a few meters above the surface, and will operate semi-independently from it.

Render of how the deployment of LEV-1 might look during landing. Image Credits: JAXA

LEV-1 and LEV-2 (as they are called) ought to be able to capture images of the landing area and SLIM itself, but “unfortunately it is not something we are able to show you immediately,” they said. Assuming the sub-vehicles are functional, they should send along that info shortly.

This story is developing, we will update it as new information from JAXA is made available.

intuitive machines odysseus descending

Intuitive Machines' first moon lander also broke ground with safer, cheaper rocket-style propulsion

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intuitive machines odysseus descending

Image Credits: Intuitive Machines (opens in a new window)

Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander officially lost power today after spending seven days on the moon. The lander made history for being the first American hardware to reach the lunar surface since 1972 and the first privately built spacecraft to land on the moon. But the lander, called Odysseus, will be remembered for another reason: its propulsion system.

That propulsion system, which uses a combination of cryogenic liquid oxygen and liquid methane, could unlock new capabilities in space and de-risk future missions by other commercial providers.

Before Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission, no lander had ever used this combination of propellants. If they sound familiar, it’s because they’re used in high-performance rocket engines, like SpaceX’s Raptor, Blue Origin’s BE-4 and Relativity Space’s Aeon R.

But landers — and most spacecraft today — use “space storable” or hypergolic propellants, like hydrazine or nitrogen tetroxide, which can be passively stored but are highly toxic. In contrast, “cryogens” are more efficient, higher energy and considerably less dangerous, but they must be actively cooled to very, very low temperatures.

This presents some unique challenges. Because the fuels must be kept so cold, they can only be stored prior to lift-off for a very short amount of time. To get around this issue, Intuitive Machines and SpaceX started fueling the Nova-C class lander’s VR900 engine (which was built by IM) just three hours before lift-off, when the rocket was on the launch pad and the spacecraft was already inside the payload fairing. This is anything but typical.

It’s so out-of-the-ordinary that SpaceX had to develop entirely new capabilities to fuel the lander, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s VP of build and flight reliability, said during a press conference on February 13. That included modifying the launch pad and the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket and adding an adapter to access the payload fairing when it was already mated to the vehicle.

The two companies performed two wet dress rehearsals prior to launch; issues with propellant loading resulted in the first launch attempt being pushed by a day, to February 15. After the successful launch, Intuitive Machines also ran into a brief issue chilling the liquid oxygen feed line, which took longer than anticipated. Once the propellant was sufficiently cooled, flight controllers successfully fired the engine in space for the first time the following day.

Intuitive Machines makes history by landing the first commercial spacecraft on the moon

Because the company was using liquid oxygen and liquid methane, which are highly efficient, they were able to take a more direct trajectory to the moon. The spacecraft only had to transit the Van Allen belt, a high-radiation zone around the Earth, once, which reduced the spacecraft’s exposure to damaging high-energy particles.

Two VR900 engines will also be used on Intuitive Machines’ much larger “Nova-D” spacecraft, to deliver 500-750 kilograms of payload to the moon. (The Nova-C lander has a payload capacity of 100 kilograms.)

The Nova-C and Nova-D landers will be far from the last spacecraft to use cryogenic propellants in space. Impulse Space’s high-energy kick stage, Helios, will use cryogens to deliver payloads directly to geostationary orbit, CEO Tom Mueller explained in an interview from January.

“People have talked about doing big kick stages with hypergols before, and I just think, you’re talking tons of propellant and the price and the cost of safety are just exorbitant,” he said. “So using very low-cost, very high-energy propellants like liquid oxygen and liquid methane is kind of like a no-brainer.”

One of the six NASA science and research payloads that Odysseus carried to the surface also directly leveraged the cryogenic propulsion system. The Radio Frequency Mass Gauge statement from the agency’s Glenn Research Center uses radio wave and antenna to measure how much propellant is available in the engine’s tanks. It is technology that could be vital for measuring spacecraft fuel levels during long-duration space missions, especially because “slosh” can make measuring liquids in microgravity a challenge.

This issue is of special importance to NASA because the agency’s Artemis missions to return humans to the lunar surface depend on spacecraft that use cryogenic propellants — chiefly SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System and Blue Origins’ Blue Moon. These missions will require transferring large amounts of cryogenic fluids from on-orbit depots to the spacecraft; while these fluids will need to be on orbit for far longer than Odysseus was in transit to the moon, the IM-1 mission is still squarely kicking down the door for cryogenic use in space.

intuitive machines im-1

Intuitive Machines' second moon mission on track for 2024

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intuitive machines im-1

Image Credits: SpaceX (opens in a new window)

Intuitive Machines’ second moon mission is still on track to launch before the end of this year, after the company only had to make minor adjustments to the lunar lander design, executives said during an earnings call Thursday.

The company made history earlier this year when it became the first commercial company to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface. That mission, called IM-1, was not without its quirks — the lander ultimately came in a little too hot and ended up tipped over on the surface — but it proved out the lander’s core components, engine, and subsystems.

That same lander class, which the company calls Nova-C, will be returning to the moon later this year in that second mission. Critically, the IM-2 mission will deliver NASA payloads that will search the lunar South Pole for water ice, a resource that could eventually be processed into propulsion for rockets or to support a permanent lunar astronaut habitat.

The Intuitive Machines team identified just “a handful of adjustments” that will be implemented on the second lander, CEO Steve Altemus said during the earnings call.

“We really don’t see any impacts to the schedule based on the changes from IM-1,” he said. “They are fairly straightforward.”

Among the changes that the company will be implementing are improvements to the laser rangefinder switch system, he added. The laser rangefinders are a navigational subsystem on the lander, and they help determine variables like altitude and horizontal velocity. Mission controllers learned very late in the game that the laser rangefinders on the first lander were not functional — because engineers did not turn on a physical switch on the component while it was still on the ground. (They managed to land the spacecraft anyway through some very quick thinking.)

The second mission may be impacted because NASA is still finalizing the landing site, which will be somewhere on the lunar south pole on a ridge near the Shackleton crater. When the space agency originally announced the landing site location for the IM-2 mission, they noted that data from the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft indicated that the area could have ice below the surface.

Intuitive Machines ended the fourth quarter of 2023 with $30.6 million in revenue and a cash balance of just $4.5 million. That number was given a significant boost after an intuitional investor exercised $50.6 million in warrants and the company closed a $10 million strategic equity investment.

As a result of these investments, as of March 1, the company’s cash balance swelled to nearly $55 million — the largest balance “relative to any quarter-end” since the company went public in February 2023.

Beyond the second moon mission, 2024 will likely be a pivotal year for the company, which is awaiting the decision on NASA awards that could be extremely lucrative. That includes the award for the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, which NASA will announce early next month, and the next lunar lander contract under the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.