{"slug": "nasa-boss-balks-at-billion-dollar-estimate-for-recycled-moon-rover", "title": "NASA boss balks at billion-dollar estimate for recycled Moon rover", "summary": "NASA Administrator Bill Nelson balked at an estimated $1 billion cost to refurbish a Moon rover for reuse, according to a report. The rover, originally built for the canceled Resource Prospector mission, was proposed for a new lunar mission, but Nelson questioned the price tag during a budget hearing. The agency is now considering alternatives for lunar exploration.", "body_md": "### MOST POPULAR\n\n[AI](https://beta.theregister.com/tag/ai)\n\n-\nSYSTEMS\n\n#### A deep dive into Nvidia's Vera CPU and the Olympus cores that power it\n\n88 custom cores, 176 funky threads, 1.5 TB of laptop RAM, and 1.8 TB/s of NVLink connectivity — this isn't your typical datacenter chip\n\n-\nOFF-PREM\n\n#### Enterprise cloud infrastructure uptake shows no sign of slowing\n\nCloud revenue now north of $143 billion a quarter, and growth is accelerating\n\n-\nDEVOPS\n\n#### Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer\n\nPersistent sessions could be just the beginning\n\n-\nSECURITY\n\n#### Anthropic and OpenAI are competing to see whose agents can go rogue harder\n\nWhoever wins, we lose\n\n-\nSYSTEMS\n\n#### UK wants datacenters to pay a fee for grid connection requests\n\nRefundable charge intended to discourage time wasters from filing applications that will never be realized\n\n[Infosec](https://beta.theregister.com/security)\n\n-\nSecurity\n\n#### Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacks\n\nPLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more!\n\n-\nSecurity\n\n#### Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attack\n\nPLUS: China upgrades smartphone surveillance tools; Ring eases anti-snooping stance; and more\n\n-\nBlack Hat and DEF CON\n\n#### DEF CON Franklin project enlists hackers to harden critical infrastructure\n\nVoting village reports have been so successful, says Jeff Moss, that the whole of DEF CON will now be included\n\n-\nSecurity\n\n#### EQT buys majority share in Swiss cybersecurity biz Acronis\n\nWent at equivalent of $3.5B+ valuation for entire firm, though portion sold not specified\n\n-\nMalware Month\n\n#### Ten years since the first corp ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end in sight\n\nOn the plus side, infosec's a good bet for a long, stable career\n\n[FOSS](https://beta.theregister.com/tag/FOSS)\n\n-\n#### FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another\n\nWord up\n\n-\n#### GNOME can look like Windows – and Flashback can do it without extensions\n\nNew 'Simple-taskbar' is an option, but there's a simpler, stabler way\n\n-\n#### A moment of silence, please, for the final release of Debian on x86-32\n\nNew Debian versions hit FOSSland in the form of 13.6 and 12.15\n\n-\n#### Baddies caught exploiting extensions bugs with perfect 10 scores on vulnerable Joomla websites\n\nFlaws in iCagenda, Balbooa Forms extensions can impact open source CMS that powers a million sites worldwide\n\n-\n#### Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assembly\n\nJoins yserver, Phoenix, and of course XLibre – and outlier Arcan\n\n-\n#### Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland – if you want it\n\nNext version of Linux Mint’s desktop has both kinds of display server", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nasa-boss-balks-at-billion-dollar-estimate-for-recycled-moon-rover", "canonical_source": "https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/08/03/nasa-boss-balks-at-billion-dollar-estimate-for-recycled-moon-rover/5282355", "published_at": "2026-08-03 13:47:43+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-03 17:15:28.788965+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["robotics", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["NASA", "Bill Nelson"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nasa-boss-balks-at-billion-dollar-estimate-for-recycled-moon-rover", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nasa-boss-balks-at-billion-dollar-estimate-for-recycled-moon-rover.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nasa-boss-balks-at-billion-dollar-estimate-for-recycled-moon-rover.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/nasa-boss-balks-at-billion-dollar-estimate-for-recycled-moon-rover.jsonld"}}