Will SpaceX’s Innovation Put NASA’s Mars Mission at Risk?

The mission would be the first to bring rock samples from Mars to Earth so scientists can analyze them for signs of past life.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a press conference on April 15, 2024, that the mission as currently conceived is simply too expensive and too delayed. NASA gave private companies a month to submit proposals for bringing the samples back in a faster and more affordable way.

As an astronomer who studies cosmology and has written a book about early missions to Mars, I’ve been watching the sample return saga unfold. Mars is the nearest and best place to search for life beyond Earth, and if this ambitious NASA mission unraveled, scientists would lose their chance to learn much more about the red planet.

The Habitability of Mars

The principal NASA missions to reach the surface of Mars in 1976 portrayed the planet as a frigid barren world, uninhabitable without a thick atmosphere to protect life from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. But research conducted over the past decade suggests that the planet may have been much warmer and wetter several billion years ago.

The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have each shown that the planet’s early atmosphere was suitable for microbial life.

They found the chemical building blocks of life and signs of surface water in the distant past. Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, is still operating; its twin, Perseverance, which landed on Mars in 2021 will play a key role in the sample return mission.

Why Astronomers Want Mars Samples

The first time NASA looked for life in a Mars rock was in 1996. Scientists claimed they had found tiny fossils of bacteria within the Martian meteorite ALH84001. This meteorite is a chunk of Mars that landed in Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Scientists disagreed over whether the meteorite actually ever harbored biology, and today most scientists agree that there is not enough evidence to claim that the rock contains fossils.

Numerous hundred Martian meteorites have been found on Earth in the past 40 years. They are free samples that fell to Earth, so while it might seem intuitive to study them, scientists cannot determine where on Mars these meteorites originated. Also, they were blasted off the planet’s surface by impacts, and these violent events could have easily destroyed or altered subtle evidence of life within the rock.

There is no substitute for bringing back samples from a location known to have been hospitable to life in the past. As a result, the agency is facing a cost of $700 million per ounce, making these samples the most expensive material ever gathered.

A Compelling and Advanced Mission

Bringing Mars rocks back Mars rocks to Earth is the most exciting mission NASA has ever attempted, and the most fundamental stage has already started.

Perseverance has still over two dozen rock and soil samplesdepositing them on the bottom of the Jezero Crater, a place that used to be potentially once flooded with water and may have harbored life. The rover inserts the samples in containers the size of test tubes. Once the rover fills all the sample tubes, it could then retrieve them and carry them to the location where NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander will land. The Sample Retrieval Lander includes a rocket to launch the samples into orbit around Mars.

The Earth Return Orbiter which can rendezvous with the rocket in orbit and capture the basketball-sized sample container. The samples will then be automatically sealed into a biocontainment system and transferred to an Earth entry capsule, which is part of the Earth Return Orbiter. After the long journey through space, the entry capsule will parachute to the Earth’s surface.

The complex choreography of this mission, which entails a rover, a lander, a rocket, an orbiter and the coordination of two space agencies, is unprecedented. It’s the reason behind the ballooning budget and the prolonged timeline.

Sample Return Breaks the Monetary institution

Mars Sample Return has blown a hole in NASA’s budget, which threatens various missions that need funding.

The NASA center behind the mission, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has laid off over 500 workers. It’s likely that Mars Sample Return’s budget partly resulted in the layoffs, but they also came down to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory having an overfull plate of planetary missions and struggling budget cuts.

In the past year, an independent review board report and a report from the NASA Office of Inspector General raised serious concerns about the viability of the sample return mission. These reports described the mission’s design as overly complex and cited issues such as inflation, supply chain problems, and unrealistic cost and schedule estimates.

NASA may be feeling pressure from Congress. For fiscal year 2024, the Senate Appropriations Committee cut NASA’s planetary science budget by more than half a billion dollars. If NASA cannot control costs, the mission could even be canceled.

Thinking Out of the Box

Faced with these challenges, NASA has issued a call for innovative designs from private industry, with the goal of reducing the mission’s cost and complexity. Proposals are due by May 17, which is an especially tight timeline for such a complex undertaking. And it will be difficult for private companies to improve upon the concept that specialists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had over a decade to develop.

A key potential participant in this state is the business space company SpaceX. NASA is already partnering with SpaceX on America’s return to the Moon. For the Artemis III missionthree test flights and needs much more development before NASA will trust it with a human crew.

In principle, a Starship rocket could possibly carry back a massive payload of Mars rocks in a single two-year mission and at a much lower cost. But Starship comes with significant risks and uncertainties. It’s not certain whether that rocket could return the samples that Perseverance has already gathered.

Starship uses a launchpad and it would need to be refueled for a return trip. But there’s no launchpad or fueling station on the Jezero Crater. Starship is designed to carry people, but if astronauts go to Mars to retrieve the samples, SpaceX will need a Starship rocket that’s even bigger than the one it has tested to date.

Sending astronauts also carries additional risk and cost, and a plan using people could end up more complex than NASA’s original plan.

With all these pressures and constraints, NASA has chosen to see whether the private sector can come up with a viable solution. We’ll know the answer next month.

Written by Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona.

Adapted from a piece of writing first and most fundamentally published in The Conversation.