(Bloomberg) -- NASA said on Wednesday it’s canceling a robotic rover program that was due to launch as soon as November to explore the moon for frozen water, citing scheduling and supply chain delays and higher costs.
The spacecraft dubbed Viper - the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover — is a 1,000—pound robot designed to search for water ice and its origins on the far side of the Moon by analyzing the soil.
Viper’s mission was originally slated to kick off in late 2023, NASA said. But NASA sought extra time for preflight testing, and further schedule and supply chain delays pushed the mission to 2025, the agency added.
NASA has already spent about $450 million on the craft, which has been fully assembled but hasn’t completed testing, Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration at the space agency, told reporters on Wednesday.
“Continuation of Viper would result in an increased cost that threatens cancellation or disruption” to other commercial lunar payload missions, the agency said in a news release.
NASA will try “alternative methods” to verify the presence of ice at the lunar South Pole.
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