Main Engine Cut Off - T+280: VIPER Cancelled, Falcon 9 Grounded

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

NASA announced their intent to cancel VIPER, the rover that was due to go to the Moon on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, after severe schedule and cost growth. SpaceX had a rare failure of Falcon 9 that has led to a (seemingly short) grounding of the vehicle.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 31 executive producers—Frank, Donald, Fred, Bob, Steve, Matt, Will and Lars from Agile, Lee, Pat from KC, Better Every Day Studios, The Astrogators at SEE, Joonas, Warren, Jan, Russell, Pat, Josh from Impulse, Joel, David, Ryan, Stealth Julian, Kris, Theo and Violet, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Harrison, and four anonymous—and 816 other supporters.TopicsNASA Ends VIPER Project, Continues Moon Exploration - NASANASA cancels VIPER lunar rover - SpaceNewsNASA Cancels VIPER Lunar Rover – SpacePolicyOnline.comChris Bergin - NSF on X: “Here are two minutes of the SpaceX launch stream where the ice build-up began.”Starlink 9-3 - SpaceX - LaunchesThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by NASAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. We've got some big news out of NASA this week. They have decided to discontinue, to cancel, to end the Viper rover. This was a rover that was due to go to the moon and land near the South Pole, explore for 100 days, was the target of the mission, to look for ice and other volatiles down in the South Pole region.

This was going to be landed on top of an astrobotic griffin, a larger lander than their first one, Peregrine, all under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. And this isn't honestly shocking, right? This project has been behind schedule over budget for years. It has been exploding in costs since it was originally outlined back at the IAC in 2019 in Washington, D.C. It was unveiled. At the time, it was stated to be a $250 million program. By the time it was uh stated to be a 250 million dollar program by the time it actually got its cost confirmed during design reviews and it was uh heading towards execution that cost estimate was about 400 million dollars it has grown since then as well the latest estimate is 609 million

dollars um which that last increase was above a threshold set in law. Once a program goes 30% over its authorized cost, it has to be reviewed for either termination or extension. They would actually have to go to Congress to get more money specifically for this. It would be a situation to sort out to get that additional money. So that point was triggered, which triggered a review of Viper in June. NASA held a call yesterday with Nikki Fox, who's the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, and Joel Kearns, who's the deputy associate administrator for exploration in that Science Mission Directorate. He's, all intents and purposes, the head of the CLPS program at headquarters and is often speaking on the matter. They held a call to announce this

and talk about some of the plans. So where we stand with Viper, we'll talk about what they announced and then we'll talk about some things that come out of that. What they announced is that they are going to be discontinuing the project because it's at risk of future cost growth. going to be discontinuing the project. Because it's at risk of future cost growth, they still aren't sure exactly what the final cost would be. As of early June, the rover is fully put together and is heading into environmental testing. That wasn't due to be done and ready for launch until late next year. The Griffin lander was also delayed to some time in that range. Now, I'm unclear if that is because, you know, entirely because Astrobotic schedule or if, you know, once you hear that your prime payload is delayed to

that time, then you're going to also delay to that time. I don't feel like that was sufficiently explained. I don't not believe it. I do believe that Astrobotic was going to be delayed until sometime next year as well. But I don't know exactly how linked that schedule was. And the other the other aspect here is, you know, $609 million that I stated as the right now that the cost estimate for the Viper, the rover side of things, that's assuming all this testing goes well. And that's assuming there's no issues leading up to launch. However, if they miss that launch date, if they were to go ahead and try that launch date, and they missed it, they would then have to wait another nine to

12 months before they'd be ready again, because they have to wait for the right lighting conditions at the South Pole. This is going to go land on the surface and operate for 100 days. So they have very, and lighting is very weird at the South Pole to Moon. So they have very specific lighting conditions that they have to meet, which makes their, you know, there are specific windows in which this mission could operate. So if any of those things went wrong or went, you know, not completely right, they'd be on the hook for more cost growth, for more scheduled delays, for a whole nother year of operating budget. And the budget could continue to grow a lot. Now, $609 million, that is just the rover side. The astrobotic task order started just under $200

million and has grown to north of $300 million. So add it all together, we're almost at a billion dollars for this program. And, you know, we're not necessarily sure exactly how it's all going to shake out in the end, but it would be over a billion dollars, because presumably one or two of those things would happen. So for all those reasons, they are canceling the program. They're going to, uh, wait until August 1st to hear from anyone interested. That could be the U S industry. That could be international partners. If there's anyone out there interested in taking over the Rover as is, uh, it would have to be at no cost to the U S government, but they could take over the Rover and potentially

fly it. I don't know if they think, uh, ESA wants to step in and operate it. Maybe JAXA, or one of the companies here working on lunar rovers might want to take it and run with it, get it through that next phase. I'm not sure anyone's going to be interested in that, given the state of the program itself and some of the history there. So if they don't hear anything back by August 1st, they don't have any interesting, interested parties, then they're going to disassemble it, reuse the instruments and

components for future missions. And then they're going to be placing a mass simulator on board Griffin for that first landing. So they are keeping the contract with Astrobotic for Griffin Mission 1. They are scheduling that launch for fall 2025 they said they would supply a mass simulator i don't know if that's just going to be honestly like the rover body minus the instruments it would be quite wild if that was what the mass simulator is but uh something representative of the mass and shape and size of uh of viper however they did say on the call that if astrobotic is able to find other commercial partners that want to fly and and kind of attach to this mission now they would downsize their

mass simulator i asked on the call if astrobotic also uh why ask two things when did astrobotic hear about this to which uh they most specific that joel kerns would get was very recently um and does astrobotic have any other control over you know they mentioned this downsizing a mass simulator but how about location do they have a little bit of flexibility it sounds like they still want to head to the south pole but they might choose a slightly different site I did ask when this was communicated Astrobotic what their actual requirements are to fulfill this contract because the contract that they won was to land the viper rover on the lunar

south pole so i assume nasa is trying to figure out a way to continue this mission without viper and they have to supply something to actually do that legally right i don't know i haven't seen the actual contract behind the scenes here all i've seen is is what's announced as the task order so maybe there's something legally within NASA that they have to provide a payload to be landed on the surface. Because otherwise they would cancel this program, it would cancel the Griffin lander

and Astrobotic would be out of business, right? That's, they haven't won another task order beyond this. There's supposed to be one or two coming up soon that NASA would announce for clips. We'll see if any of those are Griffin. I have a hunch that one of them might be. But if that didn't come through in time, what is Astrobotic to do? Their entire business model right now is NASA missions, which I think at times puts them in a situation where they are more easily able to be pushed around in this way they're saying like oh

hey here's a mass simulator we only told you about this very recently jeff faust has a line in his article about this um that astrobotic heard of this decision just a day before it was publicly announced um so yeah it's it's a weird situation but i do think you know there's there's one of two ways to read this there's the disappointing angle angle from NASA canceling the Viper rover. We'll get back to that in a second. There is the kind of way that you could say defensively to NASA that they are trying to figure out a way to not put Astrobotic out of business because of this program, that Astrobotic is overly extended in launching a Viper rover.

So they want to make sure they can still fly that mission. And then there's another angle here that is, what does Congress have to say about this? NASA had to notify Congress of this intent to cancel this mission, but Congress has to respond. And that will be very interesting because NASA has already spent $450 million on the rover. It is put together. It's waiting testing. The estimated savings by canceling Viper is $84 million, right? There's some difference in there because they have to wind down. They have to pay for the wind down of the program, the disassembly, the reuse of instruments.

So there's a savings of $84 million on the line. Now, again, that's if everything goes right right it could be a savings of much more than that if things were to go wrong maybe they need that would be a savings of 300 million dollars or something so it does quickly go from you know rounding errors on the nasa budget to a significant line item um but congress is you know they they do get a say in this i don't really know who is uh going to bat for viper these days, given everything that's going on, not just within space policy, but policy generally. I'm not sure that with the budget scenario that the US is in generally, if there's going to be appetite to go to bat for a moon rover that is run out of the space districts, but those people tend to care about a lot of other things that are on, you're threatened right now, whether that's the ISS budget or exploration budget or Artemis budget. There's a lot of competing demands there. And this doesn't have a congressional champion in the way that Europa Clipper did back in the day with John Culberson.

So I'm not sure that there's going to be appetite to go to bat for this thing. So I'm not sure that there's going to be appetite to go to bat for this thing. Now, it was always odd that Viper was kind of this thing that grew into, you know, a New Frontiers class budget mission, and it was under this other program. It did always feel outsized for the position it had within the NASA budget, and I think we're seeing the results of that at this point. For Astrobotic, I do think, you know, this is... They have a lot of plans out there. They've got Lunar Grid.

They said they want to put a Lunar Grid node on this flight. They've got a lot of things that they're working on. But I do feel like they are in a vulnerable spot right now. You know, Peregrine didn't work out. There are no more Peregrines. This was the Griffin that they had flying. There are are as of yet no more griffins on the list if a task order does go their way can they manage it better than the first two were both in terms of schedule and cost you know the early eclipse missions were very exploratory not just for

astrobotic but for everyone task order prices grew on under most providers, you know, there's an OIG report a couple months ago that that showed that, that the the other task orders doing Tud machines, Nash robotic, Mastin, Draper, most of them across the board had seen cost growth. So if and that was cost growth to NASA, not just internal. So, you know, if the numbers, I don't know what they're looking like internally at Astrobotic, but if the numbers are, you know, if they are overextended on these missions already, and one of them has kind of lost its driving payload, does that put them in a better position where maybe they can now, you know, do they have some warm leads for who might want to fly payloads in the moon? Would they be able to have them step in on this mission?

Even if this doesn't fly fall of 2025, but it flies early 2026. Would they be able to get someone lined up and on board for that? That would be an interesting thing to see because it does change the economics of that first Griffin mission a little bit. They've talked up a second mission, but we haven't seen the task order win yet so it is a precarious position for them um i don't feel great about their position today i think there's uh questions to be answered about what to do now um what to do with the churn of this right say congress does come back and and they all of a sudden insert money for viper um what is the work that astrobotic is doing between today and when that

happens and and are they ready for that if they gave if they had a one day notice of this announcement from nasa how many days notice would they get that congress is actually going to send us some extra money for that and what is the wait time you know it's there's a lot of of weird schedule things that have to happen here for this mission. Overall, astrobotic has to go out and try to find other people to fly on that mission if they want it to fly and be successful and commercially viable. But they also have to protect themselves against the chance that Congress all of a sudden finds $300 million in the couch cushions. Now, larger than that is the question about NASA's's planetary budget they are in a really bad spot right now um mars amp return we've talked about that drama over the past couple

months um there are other missions out there you know was it janice that is uh that that missed its launch i gotta look up to make sure i'm not i'm not lying i think it was janice yeah it was supposed to fly with psyche um but it was removed because of a change to uh the uh flight profile that it flew and now they are just sitting in storage they are fully complete ready to fly spacecraft that are just sitting in storage because they got canceled Viper would be yet another one of those things. Generally, there are budget issues within NASA. All the budget wedges are exploding. All of them are overlapping. None of them seem to be going in good directions and healthy directions

at the same time as all of a sudden we're paying for a $1.5 billion USD orbit vehicle for the ISS because of the situation that program's in. And I've frequently been talking about how underfunded commercial space stations are if NASA really does care about them. And that's at the same time as the Artemis program is doing its thing right now. And Gateway and everything else that's there. So NASA has all of these different competing demands right now. None of them feel well managed to me. None of it seems to go together in the right way. At the same time, budgets are coming down across the board on this side of government funding in the US here. I think the NASA budget is a little

bit of a microcosm of the larger budget issue here in the US where everything is so to the limit and overextended in a lot of ways that if a couple things go wrong, you are left with not a lot of good options. And for NASA's planetary program, they do great work, but there's just a lot that's competing. And when you're in that environment, it's not that it's hard to prioritize. It's that the influences of the budget like i said with with viper you know unless you have some sort of champion within congress that is going to be hard-headed and push something through the chances that your program gets gets that over the others is very

little um and for most of the planetary program there's not a lot of sway behind any one of those missions you know we we do see the californ California contingent coming to bat from our sample return, um, too little, too late in that case to prevent the situation it's in now. Um, historically there were some, you know,

astrophysics missions that were, that had defenders in the, the Maryland and the DC area in Congress, but these other missions, you know, maybe a person in Congress who knows about the Janus spacecraft, um, and, and would even comment on it, you know, maybe a person in Congress who knows about the Janus spacecraft, um, and, and would even comment on it, you know, name me someone who, you know, who is going to get heated about Viper, if anyone, there are some Houston area politicians probably that would,

uh, their ears would perk up that similar thing happened with resource prospector back in the day. Um, Jim Brian Stein's probably's probably uh got some thoughts on the matter right that was that was kind of his thing that that he uh announced at ic and it was a really triumphant part of talking about clips and what the the future held there but you know there hasn't been anyone that's been championing viper for a couple years now so these missions get off on their islands they they run into problems, they compete with everything else in the budget. And it creates a lot of churn. And it's distressing, especially for such a cool program that Viper, it would have been a really cool mission to follow. And it's

bummer in the way that it went, but can't really say I'm surprised given the track record here. So a lot of thoughts, a lot of people are bummed. I don't think this is the end of the storyline yet. I think there might be more to say about Viper, but we'll tackle that when it comes. All right, I want to talk about Falcon 9 for a couple minutes and the fact that it is grounded right now. You know, I mentioned on headlines, I sort of probably underreacted to this when it first happened. And I was hopeful that they'd get flying again soon. So we've got a lot to talk about there as well. But before I say anything on that, I want to say thank you to all the supporters over at managing cutoff.com

slash support. This episode was produced by 31 executive producers. Thanks to Frank, Donald, Fred, Bob, Steve, Matt,

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And otherwise, thanks all so much for listening and for supporting as always. All right, Falcon 9. They had a very rare failure about a week ago. They took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base on a Falcon 9 mission, carrying Starlink satellites up to its typical orbit. First stage went well, landed on a drone ship. Second stage went well on its initial burn, had a ton of ice buildup around the Merlin engine, the cover that goes around the Merlin engine. Ton of ice buildup, some of it flaking off.

It looked pretty awesome. To be honest, the video footage was really cool. But everything went well for that initial shutdown. The stream ended. They went to circularize the orbit and they had some sort of rapid unscheduled disassembly. The engine exploded. The stage was still able to deploy the satellites, interestingly. So the engine itself had some sort of anomaly, but the stage itself was still intact, which is an interesting aspect here. It left the satellites stranded in a low orbit. So those have all been reentering. They weren't going to be high enough to raise orbits.

Only two items were cataloged by the Space Force. One of them has already reentered. So things are coming down from there. cataloged by the Space Force. One of them has already re-entered, so things are coming down from there. What SpaceX did announce is that there was a leak of the liquid oxygen tank in the upper stage, and that caused the issue when it went to relight. Interestingly, it didn't cause issues on the initial burn, just when they went to relight the engine. So, after that failure, this is the first one in, you know, eight years, 300 something launches. It was, it has been forever since, uh, Falcon 9 has had an issue. It has been so reliable and so regular, um, you know, that it's just kind of

wild that this did happen at all. You know, um, the FAA itself said that there would be a required investigation before they would be cleared to return to flight. So SpaceX is going to have to investigate everything, find the root cause, put together a report, get that signed off on before they would be able to return to flight. Now, since that, SpaceX has asked the FAA for, essentially, you know, FAA's job is to say, you know, everything we approve will not harm public safety. There's one in however many hundreds or tens of thousands chance that someone in the public will be injured by these activities. So their job is not that the rocket works. That is not FAA's concern. Their job is to make sure that the rocket will not harm uninvolved public. So SpaceX is essentially saying, you know, we should get a waiver because

there was not a public safety issue here we can continue flying starlink missions in particular uh you know risking their own stuff to to continue to fly and prove out the vehicle as they complete the investigation um and get cleared for other missions essentially so that is that process has been started and actually as i record this there is a drone ship heading out to sea we haven't't heard the results of that from the FAA yet, but there's a drone ship headed out to sea for a Starlink mission coming up pretty soon here. So SpaceX seems confident that they will be back flying pretty shortly. I thought that was going to be the case, which is probably why I underreacted. But it's all the other missions that this has downstream effects for. There are the space

station resupply mission that was supposed to happen with Cygnus and dragons. There are all of the crude flights to the ISS, um, which is probably the biggest downstream effect here is, is what's going to happen with the ISS crew schedule. Now we've got Starliner still on board with the whole Starliner of it all. Crew eight up there is supposed to come down pretty soon. And crew nine, uh, is, Crew 9 is no earlier than mid-August right now. So the way that all plays out will be very interesting because now there's no cargo going to the ISS. There's no crew going to the ISS until this investigation is cleared.

That certainly ratchets up the importance of this investigation for SpaceX. But it really highlights the precarious situation that NASA is in with a single provider for this stuff. You know, they used to have dual providers on cargo. Right now, they've got a single provider in the fact that the next couple Cygnuses are going to fly on Falcon 9s because there's no Atlas 5s left. Vulcan has flown, but isn't flying that frequently yet. New Glenn's not flying, so we don't have a lot of other launch vehicles available right now. Red, none. No other launch vehicles available right now.

On a short enough notice, right? In any of those scenarios that you can event, Falcon 9 will be backflying. If you said, ship a Cygnus down to French Guiana and fly to the next Ariane 6, Falcon 9 will be flying by then. Can you fly to the next Vulcan? Falcon 9 will be flying by then. Can you launch it on an Atlas V? There's none left.

So in all these different scenarios, um, Falcon nine will be flying again. So this is the precarious position in is that you don't have this schedulable, uh, replacement, right? And in when Starliner is up and operational, we would know that there's this tick tock situation between providers. That was the ideal state is that SpaceX flies one, Boeing flies on SpaceX flies when Boeing flies on, um, where we're at now, you're in a jam.

You know, how long do those astronauts stay on board? Um, how much cargo do they have on board to sustain them? Can any of that be supplemented by the Russian vehicles until then? Do we have enough to, to make it? So all of the human spaceflight factors

are really tricky and interesting to watch how they play out. On the typical launch side of things, SpaceX has so many Starlink missions that they fly that by the time they complete this investigation, if they are to get this other clearance to fly before the investigation is complete, they'll have flung off a couple of more Starlink flights. And I don't really think anyone is

doubting Falcon 9 and its safety because of this one issue. I think it's more of like, yeah, we do have to find the root cause before we put people on this upper stage again. But this doesn't really, when you look at their track record, 300 and something launches in a row successfully, you don't really get concerned in the same way that you do when a launch vehicle that's still new to the market fails. There's not the same level of concern there. It's more of a thing that the state of the ISS right now with Starliner up there due to come down soon, Crew 8 about to come down, Crew 9 about to go up, and the next Cygnus to go on cargo, the next Cygnus to take cargo up is going to be on a Falcon nine. All of those things require Falcon nine. And this investigation

has to complete before any of it happens. You know, could it be a month? Could it be two months that the ISS can sustain? For sure. They're always, you know, well filled on cargo supplies because of this. But it does highlight that the dual provider scenario is really, really important. And that's for the ISS, which is relatively close and always have lifeboat capability. It gets even more important when you look at things like the Artemis mission, missions that go farther out. So a really interesting scenario that, you know, again, I'm not too worried about overall. I keep saying I underreacted the first time, and that's probably true. But I don't want to overreact either and say this is the end of everything. But it is wild that so much of the Space Launch Manifest is in peril right now. I didn't even mention Europa

Clipper coming up towards the end of the year. I don't think the investigation will take that long to wrap up. I do think this will be fairly quick. But there's just so many effects when SpaceX dominates this much of the launch manifest that these things are, they could be, you know, quite cataclysmic for certain programs if they happen at the wrong time. This didn't happen at the worst time ever for the ISS, but it didn't happen at a good one. You know, this is this is not a good scenario for the ISS to be in when there was already a lot going on between Spacewalks and Starliner, and there's been a lot of ISS chaos lately, and this adds to it. So, concerning times there, but I do think everyone will make it through just fine. So, felt like it was worth talking about that for a few minutes, but otherwise,

that is all I've got for you today. Thank you all so much for listening. Thanks for your support, as always, at manageacutoff.com slash support. If you've got any questions, hit me up on email, anthonyatmanageacutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko. And until next time, I will talk to you soon. Bye.