This is John Bachelor, conversation with my colleague Bob Zimmerman about a NASA project once destined for the moon, a lander.

Over a long period of time, however, over budget and behind schedule.

Bob gives us the drama of whatever happened to Viper and why.

Is Bob Zimmerman illustrating big space, commercial Congress, NASA, and failure.

More of this tonight.

All right, so let's give some quick history back about a decade, more than a decade ago.

NASA, this is before NASA has accepted the idea of capitalism.

NASA was going to build something called a resource prospect there. It was a billion dollar

lunar lander slash rover to go to the moon and it was a billion dollar project that was already delayed and behind schedule and over budget already

and when the Trump administration came in and they decided to go with capitalism

they canceled that project

they canceled it they said would set it to use the money to buy Luna Landis from private companies

and we'll put NASA science payloads on them.

They'll buy the payload space. So these companies will get a business, they

will develop lenses that they own and they can sell to others and we'll get our payloads

onto the moon. And NASA, though, decided they didn't want to give up on the rover so they

rewrote the resource prospect the rover and called it Viper and they put it on

Astrobotics Griffinlander. Viper and they put it on astrobiotics

Griffin land a buying paylow space on Griffin.

Well, not surprisingly,

Vipa being a government-run big project

is continued to be over budget and

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