NASA Spent $450 Million on a Moon Rover. Now It’s Canceling the Mission.

NASA will spend about $800 million to not send a robotic rover to the moon.

The rover, known as the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, is already built. The launch is still scheduled to take place late next year, but VIPER will not be aboard.

The space agency announced on Wednesday that it planned to cancel the mission and that it planned to disassemble VIPER, a wheeled vehicle about the size of a small car, which was to search for water ice in the shadows near the moon’s south pole. A nonfunctional “mass simulator” will take its place.

The reconnaissance had been intended to provide insights about what lies in eternally dim craters in the polar regions before NASA astronauts land there in the coming years. However, delays with both the VIPER rover and the privately built spacecraft that was to have landed the rover on the moon’s surface led to uncertainty about the mission’s timeline. The rising costs risked cuts or cancellations to other missions.

“Decisions like we’ve been discussing today are extremely difficult to make,” Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate, said during a news conference. “We don’t make them lightly. We put a lot of thought into the best way to move forward.”

The proposed VIPER cancellation is the latest setback in NASA’s science efforts.

Costs for a mission to collect rocks and soil from Mars and bring them to Earth for study have spiraled upward, leading NASA to ask for new, cheaper ideas for how to accomplish the task. The Europa Clipper, a robotic mission that is set to study a moon of Jupiter with an under-ice ocean, may be delayed because of problems with some of its electronic components.

NASA missions often end up costing more and taking longer than intended, and the agency still sometimes proceeds, pushing back other missions. But with NASA unlikely to receive significant budget increases from Congress in coming years, agency officials decided it was better to cut their losses with VIPER.