I also don’t doubt that it was not quite as close to the finish line as is being made out; that it was gonna cost more than another $84 million to get there. There’s a lot they are not telling us, and I think that goes beyond any struggles Ames was having with this mission, or why Ames was given it in the first place.

Dwayne Day, posting at NSF forums, had a worthwhile observation last night:

You have to consider the bigger picture: NASA’s science budget has been cut, and they no longer have the ability to shave a little off the edges of a bunch of programs, they have to cut entire programs. I’ve been hearing this in briefings on Earth science, planetary, and astrophysics for a few months now.

They have to start canceling things. And when you have to cancel things, the first thing senior leadership asks is “What are the programs that are in biggest trouble and are going to cost us the most to get back on track?” Apparently VIPER came up to the top of the list at planetary.

A number of months ago I heard a good discussion about the medium-term viability of CLPS. It’s not good.

I still think CLPS was a very good idea in principle: a way to leverage the commercial sector to handle the more mundane task of getting stuff where NASA needs it to go, and doing it more cheaply and reliably. But in execution, it was clearly underfunded and problematically structured. Add on top of that a legacy lunar science mission that the science mission directorate had already killed off once and been forced to take back on – a mission it really didn’t want – and yesterday’s news is not entirely surprising.

The result is what Kenneth Chang leads off his story with this morning: “NASA will spend about $800 million to not send a robotic rover to the moon.”