NASA wants Mars rocks faster, for less

The cost of a proposed NASA mission to gather rocks on Mars and bring them to Earth is spiraling upward and slipping further into the future. So last week, space agency officials asked for ideas on simplifying the mission and trimming its price tag.

“The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference April 15. “And not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long.”

The mission, known as Mars Sample Return, is central to the search for signs life may have existed on the red planet. The idea is to bring samples of rock and soil to Earth so scientists can prod and poke at them using their most sophisticated tools.

NASA had hoped Mars Sample Return would cost $5 billion to $7 billion and the rocks would arrive on Earth in 2033.

But last fall, a review panel concluded the cost was likely to run from $8 billion to $11 billion. NASA officials said last week they agreed with that cost estimate, and, given budget constraints, the current Mars Sample Return mission would not be able to deliver the rocks before 2040.

On Tuesday, NASA planned to issue a “request for information” seeking alternative plans from aerospace companies as well as experts within NASA, with proposals to be due May 17. Of those, NASA would finance several of the proposals, with studies finishing later this year. Then NASA would have to decide its next step.

“We’re going to need to go off to some very innovative new possibilities for design and certainly leave no stone unturned,” said Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate.

“This is the Hail Mary,” Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that supports space exploration, said in an interview.

Dreier said he had thought NASA would simply announce a delay, which would reduce the amount it was spending on the mission in a given year, while adding to the final price tag.

The first phase of Mars Sample Return is underway. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021, has been drilling and collecting cylindrical samples of rock and soil in the Jezero Crater, which contains an ancient river delta.

To undertake a mission that would move more quickly and at a lower cost, one idea might be to leave some of the samples behind on Mars. That would reduce the size and complexity of the spacecraft needed.

If scientists were forced to choose which rocks they want most, “I think that will be some very, very lively and very exciting scientific chatter,” Fox said.

In February, Dreier wrote an essay about whether NASA could turn to Elon Musk’s SpaceX for a cheaper robotic Mars Sample Return mission. SpaceX’s mammoth Starship rocket is being designed with the goal of sending people to Mars.

“The answer is almost certainly ‘no,’ ” Dreier wrote then. “At least, not anytime soon.”