NASA’s director, Bill Nelson, said that the agency’s $11 billion, 15-year plan to get samples from Mars and bring them back is not enough. But the new plan could be very good for space startups, and a lot of the planned money will almost certainly be sent there.
In the end, Nelson told the press, a $11 billion budget is too much money and a return date in 2040 is too far away. “We have to think outside the box to find a solution that works for us, doesn’t cost too much, and gets us the samples quickly.”
To put it another way, start over with business providers on board from the start.
The Mars Sample Return mission was still being planned, but last year, an outside review of the project found that it would probably not be finished until 2040 and would cost between $8 billion and $11 billion. This was because of problems with money, technology, and other factors.
After putting forward a new plan similar to the first one, NASA has now asked the space community to go even further: “NASA soon will solicit architecture proposals from industry that could return samples in the 2030s and lowers cost, risk, and mission complexity.”
Since both big companies and new space companies have been putting a lot of money into interplanetary capability, this news could be seen as a historic windfall. After completing the first private landing on the moon, a company like Intuitive Machines will likely be on a high after taking on what could be a multibillion-dollar deal.
Even if NASA only wants to give a commercial space business a quarter or half of the original budget for a project, private companies have already shown that they can get more done with less money than large government agencies.
Because the time frame is so far away, heavy launch vehicles like Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, and, of course, SpaceX’s Starship may be given the go-ahead to fly when the mission is ready to move forward. That was definitely also the plan for the year 2040, but the new, made-up date is a lot closer to now.
In between the lines, you can see that they are admitting that any journey that was planned before orbital and interplanetary travel became so common is now just not possible. NASA’s Space Launch System heavy launch vehicle is probably the biggest project of this kind, but giving up on it now would mean losing a lot. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem like there is any clear risk to choosing a leaner Mars program driven by business goals instead. (NASA and its partners have a lot of time to save and use again the most important ideas and study they’ve already done.)
Many of the businesses that this decision will help, including startups, growing space companies, primes, and launch providers, must have seen it coming and have been waiting for this day. However, the official announcement and the implication that it will be the new crop of space companies that reach big goals like a trip to Mars and back must be very reassuring.
There isn’t any money on the table yet, but it has been basically promised that the parts that would have been used for the Mars Sample Return mission will be used for whatever new plan the large “NASA community” comes up with. It’s likely that the new plan will depend on commercial services and tools a lot more than the old one did.
Also Read: The Snake Robot From Nasa is Meant to Look for Life in the Icy Oceans of a Moon of Saturn
The Commercial Lunar Payload Services sped up and encouraged the creation of many of the vehicles, spacecraft, and landers we see today, some of which were made by companies that didn’t exist a few years ago. In the same way, the newly recast Mars Sample Return mission may have set off commercial goals for the red planet.
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