Space: NASA reevaluates its plans for Mars due to lack of budget

NASA announced Tuesday that it could call on the companies of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, SpaceX and Blue Origin, to help it bring rock samples from Mars back to Earth.

Faced with an explosion in costs and delays, the American space agency had to rethink the mission to return these samples and is now considering two options, one of which relies partly on private actors.

A turnaround which comes as China, a rival power, plans to launch a similar mission around 2028, according to state media and could thus become the first country to achieve such a feat.

“It was simply unacceptable”

A round trip to Mars can take several years, due to its duration and complexity.

NASA initially expected the samples to return around 2030, but this deadline was deemed “unrealistic” last year by an internal audit which estimated that they might not actually return before 2040.

“It was simply unacceptable,” admitted Bill Nelson, the head of NASA, at a press conference on Tuesday.

Ancient microbial life that could have existed billions of years ago

With these two new tracks, the return is estimated between 2035 and 2039, he said. One is based on the use of a private actor during the first stage of the mission, and the other on a system already used by NASA.

The American space agency must decide between these two options in 2026. These options concern how to transport the spacecraft to Mars which will collect the samples and launch them into orbit. They will then be collected by a spacecraft from the European Space Agency (ESA) which will transport them to Earth.

Since 2021, the Perseverance rover has been surveying the Red Planet looking for signs of ancient microbial life that may have existed billions of years ago, when Mars was warmer and wetter than today.

Budgetary constraints

Thirty collected samples must be transported to Earth during this mission.

The options studied should also allow NASA, which faces budgetary constraints, to make savings.

The costs of the initial mission had been estimated at $11 billion (9.9 million Swiss francs) by experts in 2024, almost double those initially announced. With these new avenues, they should drop to between 5.8 and 7.7 billion dollars (5.2 and 6.9 billion Swiss francs), officials said.

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