NASA Spent $450M on a Moon Rover. Now It's Canceling the Mission | Hacker News Reader

NASA Spent $450M on a Moon Rover. Now It's Canceling the Mission

nytimes.com

> A nonfunctional “mass simulator” will take its place. ... NASA had spent $450 million on VIPER, which is already fully assembled with its science instruments installed ... testing of the rover to make sure it would survive the shaking of a rocket launch and the harsh conditions of space has not been completed. The cancellation would save at least $84 million, as NASA would no longer need to pay to complete the tests or to operate the rover on the moon ... The agency is still planning to pay Astrobotic $323 million to [take the mass simulator to the moon].

If you've already built the rover and are paying to transport it to the moon regardless, why not skip the testing and send the rover instead of a "mass simulator"? Then if it works you have a functional rover on the moon and paying to operate it is worth it, and if it doesn't work then it's the same as if you sent something non-functional on purpose.

Sounds like it'd still cost something to operate it, however, I agree that you might as well send something up there if you already agreed to pay for the trip.

Unless something like a battery fire happens in your untested rover, that compromises other mission goals.

Wild guess: they know it’s likely not going to pass tests, so better stop it and save some instruments when the hole is ostensibly only $84m, not $300m or something when another $50m is spent.

Back in the olden days of software, "testing" is where the money was spent to actually make something work.

Maybe the same is true of this Rover? That it's a pile of junk they were hoping to Change Request their way to fitness?

>Back in the olden days of software, "testing" is where the money was spent to actually make something work.

Much less so for space hardware. A large part of the engineering effort goes into testing, but you have a complete thing that gets tested. You don't just half ass the design and completely redo it in testing. These things are all planned for very early on. Hardware design isn't at all agile.

You might be right that there is a fundamental flaw that they realize would be extremely expensive to fix.

That wasn't true for the LM spacecraft and rockets was it (well, there was a complete thing there, but it was completely inoperable for years)

The article talks about a descent stage built by a private space company* that won't be delivered on time. So even if the rover tested out perfectly, they can't land it.

(*which might just mean "contractor")

Assuming this is the case, is there some kind of meaningful penalty for a contractor blowing up an entire mission like that?

I mean... beyond just not getting another contract?

Unless they're very small, they'll still win other contracts. Failure is always an option for companies in the defense sector (NASA being defense adjacent, their contractors are almost all also defense contractors).

That seems like the key point!

I knew this sounded too much like the "already finished rover" wasn't actually finished, which is a very reasonable explanation for not sending it yet.

> Prior to disassembly, NASA will consider expressions of interest from U.S. industry and international partners by Thursday, Aug. 1, for use of the existing VIPER rover system at no cost to the government.

(from NASA's release)

I assume this doesn't mean "come take it for free" but something more like "you'd have to pay us the amount we think we could get back from salvaging stuff off the rover." Otherwise I'd just say, well Astrobotic should take it off their hands.

NASA understands sunk cost fallacy.

NYT doesn’t.

The NYT is designed as an attention sink where you exchange money for some quantity and duration of intellectual feels.

They don't need to communicate this to achieve their objective. Their headline is designed to bait, capture, and sell its product.

Sunk cost implies future costs being spent in excess of value.

Costs already spent:

   - Design
   - Part manufacturing
   - Final assembly

Costs remaining:

   - Testing
   - Operations

Future costs which will be spent anyway:

   - Launch

Which begs the question... why not skip testing?

Worst case, it's non-functional or fails to land, in which case you don't have to spend the operational costs.

I was thinking the same thing. Skip the extra testing and yolo that thing to the moon.

I got an old lawn mower in my garage that might work as well. Should we send that instead?

Only if it can send back pictures of itself.

Is it electric? Because an ICE isn't going anywhere on the lunar surface.

Well, we'll suss that out during test phase, right?

Because failure is not acceptable due to bad optics and politics of public agencies.

Yep. This was my first thought too.

It would need an internal champion to make happen and I don't think anyone wants to attach their name onto this kind of yolo.

If it fails it dooms your career, or at least that's how it would be perceived.

My guess is a bunch of rumours are spreading that many of the important tests would fail if done, requiring a redesign and far bigger expenses.

> Sunk cost implies future costs being spent in excess of value.

Isn't it (future_costs + expenditures_so_far > value) rather than (future_costs > value)? If I expect to win 10 euros from the lottery and put in 9 euros already, then buying another 2-euro lottery ticket is a loss because spending 11 for an expected gain of 10 is a loss even if those extra 2 euros to gain a potential 10... or am I falling for the fallacy now?

Is this like the monty hall thing where the answer changes if you're given a chance to change your mind halfway through (in that you'd not spend 11 up front, but now that you spent 9, maybe spending the remaining 2 to minimize the loss is a good idea)?

avoiding sunk cost is the idea of not attaching value to the money already spent. if you expect to get $10 for spending $2 more dollars, that would not be a sunk cost fallacy. if you expect to get $10 and you need to spend $11 more dollars, that could be a sunk cost fallacy.

where it gets difficult is if you previously spent $10,000 and you need to spend $10 more to get $11. at that point it can feel like a good bargain compared to the total losses. that's the sunk cost fallacy.

>why not skip testing?

The article did mention that instruments on the lander would be removed and repurposed for other missions, so I guess they wanted to save money there instead of sending the lander as-is with a high probability of it not functioning at all, and all the hardware being a total waste.

> NASA understands sunk cost fallacy.

I argue it doesn't in the way you want them to.

They're cancelling it because it couldn't be saved. Projects _always_ that get approved are underestimated in cost with ballooning budgets the expectation. The point is, everyone is hoping the project is important enough AND expensive enough that congress will keep funding it because sunk-cost is almost ignored.

JWST is the poster child of this concept. SLS likely to be next.

I hate that SLS is moving forward in this manner, but I do believe 2 launch providers is better than 1...?

https://archive.ph/Tw5Xx

Another article here with video: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/techandscience/nasa-cancels-4...

"First and most important, this is in no way a reflection on the quality of the work from the mission team that are working to build this rover," said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "They have worked diligently, including through the pandemic, to be able to build this rover to look for water on the moon."

...

"Funding for the agency's science programs as a whole was reduced by $1 billion for 2025, Fox said today."

Bad idea, I'm not a republican or anything but if there's something republicans love to do is to brag about "size", China is about to start literally blossoming in key areas.

Be it: Semiconductors, green energy (just hit its 2030 targets 6 years earlier), space (just built a space station and plans for a moon base aren't that far away).

I can totally see an eventual trump presidency pouring money into NASA's budget just for bragging rights, seems very weird to cancel the mission before the elections (Plus it benefits trump lobbyists)

The President doesn't decide the budget, Congress does. The President can put forward a proposed budget, but the decision isn't theirs.

After watching this video i have serious doubts about the whole moon program https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU

Reminds me a little of the SLS which makes no sense at all other than preserving some jobs. The Space Shuttle was also ruined by military requirements that never materialized.

> The Space Shuttle was also ruined by military requirements

I’ll mostly agree there

> that never materialized.

I would not say that. There were classified shuttle missions. I would bet that they used all the throw weight and payload bay space.

In fact, the shuttle, in particular the payload bay dimensions, was designed around a particular generation of spy satellites. Said spy satellites, the KH-11 KENNEN, were very much used as a model for the Hubble Space Telescope. A derivative on the KH-11, code named Misty, did launch on the space shuttle. A total of 11 NROL missions launched on the shuttle.

I don’t remember all details but it had to do with launching polar orbits. To land safely from there the wings had to be much bigger which then caused a ton of other problems.

The whole video is from somebody who thinks like a very traditional old-space engineer who seems to think what NASA is doing, is just badly executing Apollo. They is not what they are doing and not what they are trying to do.

While some of his criticism are fair, he also misses the larger picture and tells the whole story in only a single direction. The timeline he doesn't like is a known fake timeline that everybody from the beginning new wasn't gone happen, it was just politics.

What he fails to actually do is compare and accurately assess the good and bad of different approaches. He basically picks everything good about Apollo and ignores all the negatives, and then does the opposite to the current program.

There is simply a reality of how space politics happens, he acts in his analysis like NASA can just design whatever plan they want, like the could during Apollo, this just isn't the case. Unless you understand he politics behind the current program, and how it was possible, you will not understand its technical design.

And I think his solutions aren't that insightful either.

> The Space Shuttle was also ruined by military requirements that never materialized.

This is a myth NASA likes to tell. NASA is a perfect glorious organization who never makes a mistake and therefore all problem are the fault of outsiders.

Shuttle primary issues are not because of DoD requirements. Even without those, design they had to adopt was very cost constrained and was already highly sub-optimal. To get enough money they went to DoD and that added $ but it also added more constraints.

So the straight forward Perfect Shuttle -> DoD -> Bad Shuttle isn't really the case. And anyway it wasn't actually primarily DoD, it was people who advocated for the DoD in the Whitehouse.

I know it wasn’t DOD directly. They just had budget that NASA didn’t get from Congress.

As far as the moon goes, it seems to me that the current approach is cobbled together like the SLS from different ideas but the overall vision doesn’t look very coherent.

The vision isn't totally coherent because huge part of NASA budget are simply not in control of what NASA wants to do.

Edit: Massive brain fart here. I can't do msth today. Leaving this comment here for posterity, but please move along. I can't do math here.

Its sad that $450M seems like a drop in the bucket when it comes to government spending today.

When I was born in 1988 the US had $2.6T in total debt. That number is already insane, but in this case $450M would be around 17% of the total debt accrued over 212 years.

Today we spend a few trillion more than we have every year. When do we collectively wake up and realize it's either or scam or a joke?

Note: I'm ignoring inflation adjusted values here because I'm literally talking about inflation (I.E. money printing). The comparison would be meaningless if I first adjusted for how much debt and money has been created since 1988.

If you want to ignore inflation, you might as well ignore the population delta (335.8 million in 2024 vs 244.5 million in 1988) too. If you want to maintain quality of life, more people definitely implies more need for dollars.

Our money supply hasn't increased at the same rate as ourpopulation though. $1 in 1988 would now cost $2.66 8! 2024. The population increased by 37.3% while the dollar devalued by 166%.

You're also neglecting the macroeconomics of being the world's reserve currency, and the population growth of the countries that hold US debt, and a lot of other factors, but I'm not an economist and also prefer alternative solutions to currency/money as an idea wherever possible.

Your maths is wrong by three orders of magnitude (unless you meant 2.6 billion, not trillion?) - 450M is 0.017% of $2.6T.

Anyway, it's not a scam or a joke - money is an abstract concept (the value is always mostly in what you can buy with it, not really in the thing itself). It always has been that way and always will be. Trying to compare nominal dollar values without any correction for anything (population, size of the economy, wage growth, inflation, whatever) is totally meaningless. You can literally draw no valid conclusions from doing so.

I don't know how I lodt an entire order of magnitude there, thank you for correcting me there.

Anyone coming by - please ignore my massive brain fart here.

Yeah because the thing probably doesn't work lol. Putting it up there would reveal that.

With the coming Trump administration, NASA should just wind down its operations and greatly reduce its ambition to only very small, sure-fire things it can get done with a small budget. Obviously, America isn't going to be the leader in space exploration in the future.

I kinda assume that one of the things Elon is buying with his donations is huge SpaceX contracts.

Ironically, privatizing NASA through SpaceX would save tons of money.

Probably, but SpaceX makes rockets (launch vehicles), not moon rovers, probes, telescopes, etc., so this doesn't really help for stuff like this. NASA has always had stuff made mostly by contractors, but their job is to manage the funds and the overall mission. I have a hard time believing the Trump administration is going to want to throw a lot of money at a government agency just to do rover/probe missions, when the rhetoric from that side has always been how these agencies cost too much, government can't do anything right, etc.

I'm sure Elon can make lots of money as the prime launch provider for missions the GOP would be happy to pay for: spy satellites and other things with military applications.

with Elon donating 45M/month to Trump you don't think Starship will dominate?

Making America Great Again also includes Making NASA Great Again.

Trump made the decision to land humans on the moon.

Why does NASA rely on all of these contractors? Government work is so inefficient.

NASA is saving billions with Commercial Cargo, Commercial Crew, HLS, etc. The inefficiency seems to come from NASA-run programs.

NASA has always relied on contractors, as has the rest of the US government, whether it's the rockets used in the Apollo missions, or the tanks used in WWII. The government generally isn't in the business of building anything; they work with contractors to build stuff according to their specifications.

They rely on contractors because (people claim) government work is inefficient. But in all seriousness, what business doesn't depend on contractors?

>what business doesn't depend on contractors?

The sub-contractors at the very bottom of the contractor ladder.

That's the problem with our current socio-economic system, the level of deception near the power centers keeps growing ad-infinitum. It has become a kind of self-perpetuating corruption. Corruption occurs faster than it can be uncovered. It starts in small ways such as sub-optimal hiring practices, then progresses to full-blown nepotism and regulatory capture where there is essentially no accountability. Nobody is held accountable because nobody is willing to hold anybody else accountable because those who try to hold others accountable are replaced faster than they can blow a whistle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com