Comments on: Trump administration cancels lunar rover mission

By: D. Messier

D. Messier — Mon, 30 Apr 2018 03:12:17 +0000

The mission was in pre-formulation, which I believe means it wasn’t fully funded but work was ongoing. A fair amount of work was done. It’s not clear that there were actual management problems. As for financial problems….well, it wasn’t fully funded. My guess is the administration had to make a decision on whether to go forward with it based on what had been developed. It decided for whatever reasons that there were other ways to go about exploring the moon.

By: DougSpace

DougSpace — Sun, 29 Apr 2018 23:58:41 +0000

It’s amazing that Resource Prospector Mission was able to move forward at all under the Obama Administration. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was underfunded and hence slow.

I suspect that the switch to SMD was so that resource prospecting would be absorbed into a the program to establish an ongoing set of commercial lander & rover missions – “capitalism in space”. Yet, as prep for crew return, we should get the Resourve Prospector results using whatever approach works the quickest. And, we shouldn’t be waiting around before starting to build crew-scale lunar landers such as the XEUS-ACES.

By: John J.

John J. — Sun, 29 Apr 2018 03:53:05 +0000

According to Mark Whittington, RP is not completely dead.
https://us.blastingnews.com/news/2018/04/nasa-clarifies-the-lunar-resource-prospector-situation-002535227.html

By: Dick Eagleson

Dick Eagleson — Sun, 29 Apr 2018 03:36:29 +0000

I hope you’re right and that Bridenstine’s promise of multiple better rovers to come proves out. One should certainly never casually dismiss an explanation based on the incompetence of NASA management. But given the long lead-times of typical NASA planetary science efforts, cancelling a program halfway to completion also smacks of violating the “bird in the hand” principle. Let’s sincerely hope there prove to be at least two more to be found in the bush.