Blue Origin wins NASA deal to ferry VIPER rover to lunar south pole

On Friday, Blue Origin gained a significant NASA contract to ship a lunar rover to the moon, a powerful vote of confidence in each the Blue Moon lander and the way forward for human exploration.

The contract additionally signifies that the VIPER rover will lastly see the lunar floor after NASA shelved your complete program final yr attributable to delays and price overruns.

Below the deal, Blue Origin will carry VIPER – brief for “Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover” – on its uncrewed Blue Moon Mk1 lander. Individually, NASA has awarded the corporate a human-rated lander contract beneath Artemis, however that program is distinct from this mission.

This new award was granted beneath NASA’s Business Lunar Payload Providers activity order for roughly $190 million. Blue Moon Mk1 is focusing on a website close to the lunar south pole, the place scientists suspect there are vital shops of water ice. VIPER will drill down into the floor to check that speculation.

The choice closes an unsure chapter for VIPER. The company first chosen Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic in 2020 to ship the rover on its Griffin lander, an award initially valued at $199.5 million. After delays on each the rover and lander, NASA canceled VIPER in July 2024, citing ballooning prices, though a lot of the {hardware} was already constructed.

The transfer drew criticism from lawmakers and scientists. One month later, NASA issued a request for concepts from U.S. corporations to discover methods to place the prevailing rover to work with out including further prices to the federal government.

For Blue Origin, this win is essential: this award provides the cargo workhorse lander its first high-profile scientific payload and pins it to a schedule, late 2027. It additionally marks a second main NASA endorsement of the corporate’s lunar ambitions after the Human Touchdown System contract.

In regards to the measurement of a golf cart, VIPER will spend roughly 100 days on the lunar floor, driving round, prospecting and drilling to map water ice deposits. The rover is supplied with a number of devices, together with the drill and three spectrometers designed to detect water, hydrogen and different minerals.

The outcomes are key to NASA’s future science objectives and to any long-term human presence on the moon, the place extracting sources in-situ – relatively than hauling them from Earth – will likely be vital. Ice may in the future be changed into ingesting water, oxygen, and even rocket propellant.