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Astrobotic selects Falcon Heavy to launch NASA's VIPER lunar rover
Astrobotic has signed a contract with SpaceX for the launch of its Griffin lunar lander, carrying a NASA lunar rover, on a Falcon Heavy in 2023.
Astrobotic announced April 13 that it selected SpaceX's Falcon Heavy for its Griffin Mission 1 lunar lander mission, which will deliver the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) spacecraft to the south pole of the moon in late 2023. Astrobotic won a NASA competition through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program last year to transport VIPER on its Griffin lunar lander.
[...] VIPER is a NASA mission to investigate permanently shadowed regions of craters at the lunar south pole that may contain deposits of water ice that could serve as resources for future crewed missions. It is designed to operate for 100 days after landing.
NASA originally planned to launch VIPER in 2022, with a mission cost of $250 million. However, NASA postponed the launch to late 2023 to provide more time for work to increase VIPER's mission life from 14 to 100 days. That, in turn, drove up the cost of VIPER to $433.5 million, NASA disclosed in March.
Previously: Astrobotic to Use "CubeRover" to Explore the Moon
NASA Selects Three Companies to Land Science Payloads on the Moon
MoonRanger Robotic Rover Will Seek out Water on the Moon
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @10:26PM (2 children)
1. First class flights home for all the troops Retreatin' Joe is bringing home (who would have thought it would take al Qaeda 20 years to the day to win?)
2. Lawsuit settlements when Trippin' Joe's vicious Alsatian Major takes out a visiting troop of boy scouts
3. A few more transgender bathrooms on top of the planned $3 trillion boondoggle
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday April 13 2021, @11:50PM (1 child)
Blow Retreatin' Joe out your arse. Trippin' Joe and Sleepy Joe and Sniffin' Joe are all on target. As for Afghanistan, we shouldn't have been there more than a year. There was never any good reason for us to take up residence there. India doesn't want it, China doesn't want it, Russia doesn't want it, even the Afghans don't want it. WTF we want it for?
We could have done all the necessary ass kicking in a few months, AND captured bin Laden, if we just had the balls to get it done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 14 2021, @03:17AM
IIRC the Taliban were well on their way to extinction when
Dick CheneySolid Intelligence convinced Bush to Leroy Jenkins into Iraq. Peace doesn't feed the military industrial complex but eternal war means profits forever.