NASA's VIPER is half-built, with launch plans for this year

NASA's much-delayed Moon rover, VIPER, is progressing toward a 2024 launch, with its project manager declaring the trundlebot half-built. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will spend 100 days at the Moon's South Pole to search for ice and other potential resources. It has three instruments and a one- …

[Ian Johnston]

Over the years I have bought many hundreds of connectors for houses, cars, boats and aircraft, up to 240V and 500A. None of them has ever failed or had a problem from foreign objects within them. Why can't NASA get reliable ones? I presume they pay at least two orders of magnitude more than I ever have.

"Space is hard" starts wearing off as an excuse after a while. I am sure that some space is hard, but connecting wires together?

[I ain't Spartacus]

You probably don't use your connectors in low or zero gravity though. Or subject them to vibration and drop testing.

[SnailFerrous]

Moon dust is a bit like shattered, statically charged, abrasive, sharp glass. Gets everywhere and does horrible things to human made stuff, like connectors. Space is still hard!

[the spectacularly refined chap]

How many have to cope with extreme vibration at launch, operating temperatures varying over several hundred celsius and lunar regolith that is both incredibly fine and extremely abrasive?

[DS999]

And don't forget the multiple Gs at launch, transfer orbits, and landing.

[Tom Chiverton 1]

Great. Now go order ten of all the corrected parts, build another half dozen rovers for next to nothing, then ship them all up so your not stuck if this one throws a wheel after 100 yards or fails to arrive.

Or is NASA still not set up to work with production, not experiment?

[the spectacularly refined chap]

I'm sure they would be happy to do so if you send them a cheque to cover the cost.

Otherwise this mission has been designed with particular goals in mind. Replicating the same test package six times does not get six times the science done.

[DS999]

What is NASA going to do with 10 rovers? Some smartass congressman will say "you really only needed 1/10th of that budget so we'll correct it on next year's allocation". As it is probably a lot of them are like "we've already been to the moon, why do we need even one rover there?"

They do always build at least two - they have a duplicate at home to test any changes in the way it is used, software updates, and so forth.

[John Brown (no body)]

Astrobotic has two lunar landers

Shirley they mean "potential" landers. Neither are proven yet, although I'm looking forward to see how they both perform over the next couple of months :-)

[fishman]

Vulcan

Since this is being launched on an untested rocket NASA must be getting a fantastic deal on the launch costs.