The agency recently moved the VIPER mission start date, based on NASA Headquarters requesting additional testing by the CLPS provider for VIPER’s lunar delivery. While the VIPER team continues to push forward with existing plans, this change in the required launch readiness date gives VIPER an opportunity to rebalance and optimize our forward plans that already have had to dramatically adapt due to industry realities and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For example, there have been numerous changes of commercial vendor delivery dates, affecting the availability of VIPER parts and services we need to build and test our water-and-resource-hunting Moon rover. These and other personnel impacts makes an already challenging mission development environment even harder.
For now, the VIPER team’s focus remains on subsystem assembly and testing. Our most recent VIPER rover egress testing with the Astrobotic lander team was fantastic, enabling us to not only test basic rover/lander interractions, but also do early operations testing, and more!
Go VIPER!
– Dan Andrews, VIPER Project Manager