NASA Terminates Last Moon Rover After Trump Touts New Era Of Lunar Exploration

Just months after President Donald Trump hailed a new era of lunar exploration, scientists said they were stunned to learn the plug has been pulled on NASA’s last moon rover.

The rover, which was being designed for lunar missions in the early 2020s, was killed as NASA revealed plans to cultivate “commercial partners” for moon exploration.

But lunar scientists said they learned April 23 that the agency is abandoning plans for its Resource Prospector rover at the end of May. The little rover was being designed to excavate hydrogen, oxygen and water from the lunar poles, with the aim of determining how to extract and use lunar resources to support human life on the moon.

“I’m a little shocked,” Clive Neal, NASA’s emeritus chairman of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, told The Washington Post.

The mission was reportedly cut due to lack of funding, according to a letter sent by lunar scientists to NASA’s new administrator, Jim Bridenstine, calling on him to save the program.

Bridenstine said in a tweet: “We’re committed to lunar exploration @NASA” with “more commercial partners.”

We’re committed to lunar exploration @NASA. Resource Prospector instruments will go forward in an expanded lunar surface campaign. More landers. More science. More exploration. More prospectors. More commercial partners. Ad astra! https://t.co/FaxO6WUDow
— Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) April 27, 2018

The deposits that were to be mined by the rover would have “extremely important exploration implications, as they could be viable resources to support not only human exploration into the solar system but also a thriving lunar economy,” said the letter to Bridenstine from Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, which helps analyze scientific, technical, commercial and operational lunar mission issues. Materials could also hold important clues about the moon and space, said the scientists.

The decision to cut the rover “is viewed with both incredulity and dismay by our community,” the letter states. “RP was the only polar lander-rover mission under development by NASA ... and would have been ready for preliminary design review at the beginning of 2019.”

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