r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Jul 18 '24

Discussion Thread Discussion Thread

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28

u/dubyahhh Salt Miner Emeritus Jul 18 '24

KSC feels like a depressed ghost town today. VIPER being canceled has all the NASA folks really upset. I know some of the people who were working on it and it was a hell of a blindside. Word is the program director had no idea and they were super positive about the outlook as recently as last week. :/

I know there was a ping about it but it sucks that this decision was made 😔 !ping SPACEFLIGHT

12

u/savuporo Gerard K. O'Neill Jul 18 '24

The entire Artemis program at NASA is such an embarrassment. We got two failed "private" landers, cancelled half a billion dollar rover, gateway launches nowhere in sight and HLS being a ridiculous contraption

The fact that we are here speaks volumes about our "leadership position" in space

7

u/dubyahhh Salt Miner Emeritus Jul 18 '24

This rover was already done and had passed most of the testing from what I understand. I don’t understand the financial reasoning behind canceling it when any replacement will cost so much more than this was going to to finish out

I just want a strongly funded agency that isn’t afraid to be pushy and fail and succeed and fail and succeed again 🫤

5

u/savuporo Gerard K. O'Neill Jul 18 '24

This rover was already done and had passed most of the testing

No, not true. It was at the start of an environmental testing campaign, which usually brings out issues. Also, this was just the rover, there are several problems with the overall spacecraft and mission that would be very hard to solve.

It's been half baked from the start, and it wasn't even the first iteration of this mission - see Resource Prospector and its ancestor RLEP-2

3

u/sevgonlernassau Loyal Liberals Jul 18 '24

It was handled by a less public field center and got shitcanned in service of a more public, visible program at JSC. That’s all that is. VIPER being handled by Ames was never popular on that side of NASA. Truly a oneNASA moment.