NASA announced Tuesday that it could call on the companies of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, SpaceX and Blue Origin, to help bring rock samples from Mars back to earth. The costs of the mission have doubled since its launch.
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 them relies partly on private actors and the other on a system already used by NASA.
Competition with China
This turnaround 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. 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. “That was all simply unacceptable,” admitted Bill Nelson, the head of NASA, at a press conference on Tuesday. With these two new tracks, the return is estimated between 2035 and 2039, he said.
Faster and cheaper
These two options concern how to deliver the spacecraft to Mars that 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. Thirty samples collected 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 by experts in 2024, almost double those initially announced. With these new avenues, they should drop to between $5.8 billion and $7.7 billion, officials said.
