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from the escape-from-the-return-to-the-moon dept.
The Washington Post reports that NASA "has canceled its only lunar rover currently in development," Resource Prospector. From Wikipedia:
Resource Prospector is a cancelled mission concept by NASA of a rover that would have performed a survey expedition on a polar region of the Moon. The rover was to attempt to detect and map the location of volatiles such as hydrogen, oxygen and lunar water which could foster more affordable and sustainable human exploration to the Moon, Mars, and other Solar System bodies.
The mission concept was still in its pre-formulation stage, when it was scrapped in April 2018. The Resource Prospector mission was proposed to be launched in 2022.
takyon: Meanwhile, NASA is "pushing hard on deep space exploration" with the Moon as its goal.
Also at Space.com, The Verge, and Fortune.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday April 30 2018, @04:06PM
I thought they did, and it's called SpaceX :-)
But seriously, somebody needs to do the boring years long biology/agriculture/psychology experiments for space exploration (need to close that ecosystem so only vitamins and medicines need to be imported).
Mind you, those type of experiments are probably orders of magnitude cheaper than building a huge SLS rocket. Give the scientists a good wage, and hire tens of thousands of them (selected to have the patience of a Gregor Mendel), and give them all the laboratory equipment they'd need (fake regolith, water, crustose lichen etc. etc.) and it's still cheaper than an SLS launch.
Let's see: US$ 35 000 000 000 / ( 10 years * 100 000 / scientist ) = 35 000 scientists. Take off a huge wad of money for laboratoria and materials and it's US$ 500 million, and 34 500 scientists, for 10 years. That should give it a boost.