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It was supposed to launch in 2018, then was pushed to the early 2020s on a Russian rocket. For obvious reasons, it got pushed again, now launching in 2028.
The state of the world isn't great for space exploration, but I'm hopeful this mission will be revived at some point in the future.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin_(rover)
[1] https://spacestatsonline.com/launches/beo
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Organic_Molecule_Analyser
With the price of launches so low compared to only 20 years ago due to advancements in launch technology and the increased cadence of launches it seems like it should be easier to do these kinds of missions and that there should be more, cheaper missions that are willing to take risks because the per mission cost is so much lower.
Can you comment on why that doesn't seem to be happening? Why aren't we covering Mars in cheap rovers and satellites?
When launching large masses to high energies gets cheaper, payloads have a chance to get cheaper, too.
At least space exploration results in some valuable technology being developed, even if done in an extremely expensive manner.
In fact, that kind of standing order for a new Curiosity every year is exactly how you would keep the technology alive in practice.
When I worked at Boeing, sinking a die for a forging cost $250,000. Forging the part cost a few dollars.
Launch is cheap for SpaceX. But they still charge high prices for everyone else. It's often estimated that a Falcon 9 launch costs SpaceX $15-20m, but they charge $60m+ to customers.
Seems that the reduced cost is being taken advantage of. And, make sure to exclude the drastic reduction in non-lunar launches in your cost comparison for lunar launches.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#2...
Also I think we need to start looking at smaller institutions and even private companies doing beyond LEO research soon - exactly because of the launch costs going down.
Yet at the same time, traditional big exploration players don't seem to be really able to make use of ti quick enough for some reason (politics ? inertia?).
NASA is stuck in the past and does it consciously and voluntarily.
And as others have said, there is really no such thing as a cheap rover. As a recent example, there was recently a push by NASA HQ to refurbish a Mars rover engineering unit (basically a one-to-one copy of the one sent to Mars, kept at JPL for use in ops planning and issue debugging) into an operational lunar rover. The estimated cost to take this existing piece of hardware and make it fully flight ready and suitable for the new mission was hundreds of millions of dollars.
But the reason we kept throwing good money after bad is because the goal was never really about making a good launch system. It was all about sending money and creating stable long-term jobs in various states and districts, actively supported by the politicians representing those areas. So you had parts being built all over the place, in a way that just sends costs skyrocketing, but that's okay - because the rocket isn't the goal.
Of course the government itself is aware of this problem, much like fishermen are aware that overfishing is self destructive in the long-run, even if they are nonetheless individually motivated to do exactly that. So I think this was why the big push for commercializing space. And I think we'll ultimately see the exact same thing with deeper space missions and technologies. SpaceX's goal is Mars and I see no reason to think they will fail there. At that point, costs for various Martian missions - be they sample return, rovers, or whatever else - should be relatively negligible relative to today. Exactly as happened when we went from ferrying people to the ISS using the Space Shuttle, to when we started launching them on Falcon rockets.
Cynicism is a variety of compliance in advance. It creates the conditions it decries.
Obviously there are corrupt politicians. But also obviously there are politicians who actually want to advance the public interest. It is the job of voters to tell them apart and ensure only the latter become the custodians of state power.
Personally I couldn't give a shit about astronauts landing on the moon I want hundreds of drones flying around the solar system doing science but I'm the minority. At least ESA isn't doing much propaganda.
The numbers above are notional, not literal. But you get the idea.
In space everything is an orbital change. To change orbits you need to speed up and slow down, all of that requires fuel. Even using what are known as "low energy" trajectories that use a bunch of gravitational slingshots need velocity changes to adjust trajectories to get the right angle of approach to some large body.
Most commercial launch services focus on LEO because the secondary stages don't need to carry much fuel and their engines only need to fire reliably once to get into a stable orbit.
A planetary transfer requires multiple engine firings. That's much harder than a single reliable firing. It's not impossible but the testing and engineering is expensive.
A science mission often needs to beg, borrow, and steal to get built. There's one shot to accomplish the mission objectives. That's more expensive engineering and testing. Some mission profiles require specific planetary alignments with very narrow launch windows to boot. So there's a lot of expensive work made more expensive by a tight deadline.
The actual marginal cost of the rocket, fuel, and launch is a very small part of the mission cost. Halving the launch price doesn't necessarily affect the cost of anything else.
Starlink satellites are effectively disposable. If a Falcon 9 explodes or fails to get the second stage to orbit they're out maybe a few tens of millions of dollars. If a science mission has some mission-killing failure there's no funding for a do-over.
I’d be interested in working there to help accelerate the program but I’m not if I would get support internally.
I'm worried it's arguments like this that doomed MSR [0]. Why spend 11 billion to get a couple rocks back in 2040 when Starship will be sending astronauts in 2030? But now it seems the near term goals of the Starship program are changing. At this point, who knows when we'll send people to Mars?
> buying rocks from a contractor with quoted price and lead time
I don't know about you but I'm not hearing anyone say they've reserved Starship mass-to-Mars-and-back. You're right that we should rely on private industry more. The CLPS program is the most comparable example (although time will tell whether it's a good one). But for a mission with the risk tolerance of MSR, the CLPS model doesn't work, IMO.
And meanwhile the Chinese are planning on launching their sample return in 2028. They're gonna beat us by a decade.
[0] My thoughts here are partially from this great blog post: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/who-is-the-villain-in-mars...
We should aim for the long game. An insanely expensive one-time mission using disposable rockets to analyze rocks that we've already analyzed with rovers is probably not the best path.
So you are missing the fuel for the return trajectory, which they plan to make there IIRC. So add in situ resource utilization to your list.
Okay, okay, rather we're not getting humans back off of Mars anytime soon.
Landing is by far the easy part. MSR was partly a mission to see how hard it really is to get anything back into space from the Martian surface. If you can manage a pound, you can probably then manage 3 or so 180 pound humans and all their safety support.
Like, think of it. You somehow have to land a fully fueled rocket on freaking Mars. No site prep, near vacuum and no aero breaking, very expensive and nearly impossible second chance.
Fine fine, you just land the shell and then refuel on Mars with some form of automated fuel refinery on Mars. Like, if you have robots that can do that, you've ended capitalism already and have no need for humans in the first place.
Im not saying a human return mission is impossible, but it is just so very much harder than a Trillion dollar Apollo program lets us believe.
So what advantage, in the realm of all possibilities, would this give China that we should be seriously concerned about?
We have such bigger existential threats right now that my emotional response to the quoted text is an aggressive lack of concern.
Definitely haven't made a complete argument here, but those are my thoughts. I know there are more concrete, pressing issues out there. But we don't all have to save the world. We just have to do our part and be decent human beings.
China in the current era is doing sample returns from the Moon, building horizontal skyscrapers, hosting a 'robotic olympics' where they're breaking all sorts of human records in quite impressive looking ways [1], and much more. And now just casually blowing by the US in space capability? To say nothing of it coming scarcely more than a decade after we banned them from the ISS [2] for fear they'd still all our super secret space sauce? That's going to do crazy good things for the morale, mindset, and broader unity of a society.
Basically a good reason to do cool things is to do cool things. I think one quantifiable result of this sort of stuff is that now we live in a society where most American kids want to be YouTubers, while most Chinese kids want to be astronauts. [3] It's not hard to see how that sort of upbringing is going to shape the future generations of a society.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJyktujxO7I
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment
[3] - https://www.businessinsider.com/american-kids-dream-of-being...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment
Not only are political officers making science decisions, but nasa lost its way in the depths of over engineered missions due to requiring a senator to be bribed by the quantity of home stage work.
If it doesn't happen then its of worse quality.
No need to. Mars delivers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/arts/who-owns-this-chunk-...
The website wasn't available anymore
The Chang’e missions plan for this in 2030 and they have hit every target to date. While the US is currently targeting 2028, it isn't inconceivable that it can slip by two years.
We are not in a hurry now, because we already won that race many decades ago!
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
President Donald J. TRUMP"
China also does this. We just don't hear about it because they also quash the reporting.
These are smart people, they’re not going to make major life decisions based on simplistic takes from political opportunists.
It’s fine to talk about a “race” if jingoism is the thing that gets most people on board with funding Nasa. But we ought to know better.
They are co-occurring facts in the same area and the only reason China’s success is relevant in this discussion is because it is co-occurring with and in the same field as the American decline that is (unlike the tangential Chinese angle) directly relevant to the story here.
So, in this specific case, if we are going to mention China at all, the answer is yes. Not because the two things are so linked that they ALWAYS need to be discussed together, but because that is the relevant nexus between the present subject and China at all.
And ironically the US very much considers itself to be in a race with China including in space, it's just run by such thundering morons that most of the moves they make advance China's interests more than theirs. Now the cancellation of Mars Sample Return isn't that big an issue in terms of strategic benefit or decline narratives, nor is it a particularly massive surprise (the program's issues are longer term than just current administration cuts). But there is a certain irony in some of the people most interested in scorekeeping with China (and for that matter Mars!) being the ones likely to ensure China pulls off the sample return first.
The Chinese rise is also remarkable in its own terms, but it's not the subject of discussion here. The subject here is how the US is under cutting its former preeminence in science.
People took issue with the cost of space exploration in context of "the good the money could do here on Earth", but then when we shifted resources that way, the money did absolutely no good here on Earth.
What view do you have on the trajectory of the U.S.? Is America ascending or declining?
The success China is having isn’t something that’s occurring in isolation. There is a void and they are filling it.
Former Soviet people might...
Boomers and Silents (and, to a lesser and understandable extent re: Challenger, Gen X) should be ashamed, though.
I get harangued every time I point the finger, but for Pete's sake, Millennials didn't do this. Millennials wanted to go to Space Camp. It has to be SOMEONE'S fault. SOMEONE take responsibility.
Chinese speak English. I mean, you only need to watch youtube videos here.
More business in China though, tricky to prioritize since I'm doing any of this for the abundance of intimacy and the slavic people come with that, for me. I need to learn Mandarin and Russian.
at least Cantonese is no longer seriously a contender in my sphere. That was distracting
And kicking people off of twitter and facebook for similar banned thoughts?
https://grantwitness.org/nsf
Download the CSV and search for things like "Latinx" or "Black" or "equity" or "URM" (URM = non-white)
>CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: Gender-Inclusive Open Source through Gender-Inclusive Tools
>This work will harness foundational gender research to provide theory-based yet practical solutions, towards addressing the underrepresentation of women in OSS communities.
>The AGEP Florida Alliance Model: Improving Minority Women Success in STEM Faculty Careers
>The research team is also investigating ways that URM women in STEM build skills, knowledge and competencies to successfully enter and persist in faculty careers.
>STEM Leadership, Equity, and Advancement for Faculty
>The NSF ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers
Most of these are pure racism and absolutely deserved to be revoked.
Yeah classic woke stuff that
> TRTech-PGR: NSF BSF - Recombining Allelic Diversity via Genome Editing for Dissecting Complex Plant Traits
This would be funny if it wasn't happening in real life. Clearly they did "ctrl-f diversity" and didn't actually read what they were cancelling.
> NASA needs to rethink its goal of returning samples from the Martian surface to Earth, the agency’s administrator Bill Nelson said in a press call on Monday.
Steady as she goes, Mr. Sulu.
I think the Trump admin decided since it will not make them a profit, like other scientific research already canceled, it is not worth doing.
> Engages in pointless wars
Also, the war cannot be won without boots on the ground, and that is also not feasible as you need 2-4x the amount of soldiers that the enemy nation has to successfully conquer a nation (as per the US Army / CIA handbook), and Iran has about a million soldiers, so 2-4 million US soldiers would be required for that.
It would literally turn into another Vietnam or Afghanistan. Unfriendly terrain where everything needs to be flown or sailed in, hostile population where the US has been painted as the "big devil" for 50+ years.
Speaking of Afghanistan, Taliban had 58,000 "soldiers", and we sent almost 600,000 soldiers there (peak strength) and still lost the war, and Iran is very similar to Afghanistan.
On the other hand, a US retreat would mean Iran keeps the chokehold on global oil reserves, and are free to develop nukes, with any future missions by the US to limit their nuclear weapon research resulting in a worse situation than before.
So yeah, basically a forever war, one that everybody that knows even the tiniest bit about the Middle East has advised against pretty much forever.
What worries me the most is that I can’t imagine students and citizens going to protest en masse on the streets against the war. They’re too busy to complain on X and Tiktok to do anything about it.
I don't think that option even exists. In my opinion the world order changed this year, the USA w/ it's trillions of dollars of GDP and huge military lost it's grip on the ME.
I think you missed the “pointless” part of the argument, such as it was.
By killing the anti-nuclear leadership of such country and proving their opponents points that only nukes could protect them from the USA...
It was called JCPOA but Israel didn't like it because it would've meant peace for the region. War _is_ the point for Israel at this point.
Further, the agreement allowed Iran to develop more advanced centrifuges. The kind which could be used to enrich uranium to weapons grade.
Further, the agreement left substantial nuclear infrastructure and expertise intact. For example, Fordow was not dismantled and 1,044 IR-1 centrifuges remained there. Natanz also retained thousands of operating centrifuges.
In 2025, the IAEA concluded that Iran had failed to declare nuclear material and nuclear-related activities at Lavisan-Shian, Varamin, and Turquzabad, and could not determine the whereabouts of some nuclear material.
The JCPOA allowed Iran to significantly expand its military capabilities and strengthen the regime via economic sanction relief, the release of hundreds of billions of dollars of Iranian international assets, and normalisation of trade (most notably oil). Iran used this opportunity to consolidate power without any material commitment or action towards sustainable cessation of nuclear weapons research and capability.
One could argue that it was the best of all bad options on the table, but let us not pretend it was a good option. Iran has been funding death and terrorism all over the world for decades. Its stated goal is the annihilation of many Western nations. The treatment of its own people is beyond comprehension and description. It routinely practises the rape of virgin women before execution (for things like not dressing modestly, or protesting), so that these young women will end up in hell. If the world were just, the entire world would unite to invade Iran, remove the dictator class from power, and implement democracy.
Just to be crystal clear: none of what I have written states nor implies that Trump has handled this conflict well.
Sorry, but all you did was:
1. Showed them and the world that treaties with you are worth nothing
2. Showed them and the world, to gain the respect of the US, you need nukes. Decades of loyalty, treaties or good partner have been shown to be worth nothing, while being an authoritarian dictatorship and having nukes are respected.
3. Showed them and the world that having US bases on your soil is a liability and not a protection.
All in all if you were US president and your task was to destroy the US' standing in the world, there is not much more you could have done.
It make sense to a certain extent to focus on a capability researches vs largely throw away mission to deliver a few rocks for 20 billions.
The underlying program was in trouble. NASA had already concluded before Isaacman took over that the existing Mars Sample Return architecture had become a roughly $8–11 billion project with samples potentially not reaching Earth until around 2040.
So yes: NASA killed the bloated $11B / 2040 version of Mars Sample Return.
Isaacman is pushing NASA’s Mars program toward cheaper, faster, modular missions, greater use of commercial spacecraft and launch providers, and infrastructure that can support both science and eventual human exploration.
That makes the “NASA is abandoning Mars science” framing fake news. NASA is abandoning a specific, extremely expensive architecture.
Isaacman has explicitly left open the possibility of retrieving Perseverance’s samples through a different approach.
The real question is to what extent the new model will actually deliver the samples faster and for dramatically less money.
It says they have two sets of every sample: One onboard and one in the designated drop area.
The drop area is a backup: if the rover dies while travelling somewhere, the return pickup mission would not be in the right spot.
* Storing all the samples onboard means a larger and heavier rover
* Mass budget squeeze means no more helicopter
* The return requires a ground launch from mars, so no more SkyCrane delivery system
I feel like SpaceX does an amazing job of producing docos and media (constant professionally-commentated live streams etc) but I never seem to see much from NASA. Sad, really.
Who are these "powers that be"? And do they have an infinite credit card? Could they really just do whatever they want and for some reason they choose not to?
The "powers that be" chose to lose a completely optional and ill-conceived war on your dime. Instead of science or helping people they decided to spend money blowing up schoolgirls.
The reason why NASA ended the Apollo program is because the American public 1) was never as committed to Apollo as younger people seem to believe they were with most people being indifferent to it and plenty of people being outright against it as wasteful, and 2) even the modicum of support it had on the Apollo 11th landing was gone by the next mission. Famously, Apollo 13 was notable for regaining the attention of the public, which it almost certainly would not have had if it weren't for their lives being on the line.
The public has almost never voted for more funding to NASA. The Kennedy Administration put a shitload of money into NASA hands, without real public approval, for geopolitical goals. It was never for public anything. The public just cannot be assed to spend even a few dollars on things they don't like, and they've never cared for generic space science.
The general public can in fact do whatever they can manage to fund, including through enormous debt, which is how we spent like $40 trillion on stupid wars in the desert for no reason. I was never really in agreement with doing that, but for some reason such a suggestion was "Unamerican", as claimed by the very people bitching about the debt right now. Who just so happened to be mostly the same people voting on doing those stupid wars.
It doesn't matter how many games you want to play with how "the system" makes it hard to vote for the right people, or how the incentives are constructed, but even in such a system, the Trump power bloc is still based around voting people out if they get in his way. The power always comes down to voting. The people in our government do all the shenanigans they do because it's how you capture the votes. They pander to giant businesses because those businesses pay for their political ads, which always go up in price so that only the largest businesses can afford to control them. But politicians do it because those ads get them the votes. If just doing their job better got them more votes, they would do that, or be replaced with someone who would.
The powers that be are the voters, with caveats and nuance.
Maybe in some ideal world the US and China would work together to pass those samples on to a Chinese MSR, but it seems borderline impossible.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09413-0
https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/china-on-track-to-launc...
They are scheduled to go in 2028.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-3
Some other countries might still develop ideas but when it's time to actually put it into practice and scale it seems it'll always require the Chinese to play a huge part in it. They're the only ones with appetite for "unprofitable" projects that have returns in decades.
Either deliver it under-budget or it should get cut. NASA has become more of a jobs program than a space program. Hopefully that changes.
Which of the 180ish elements would possibly be found on a foreign body in enough scale that couldn't possibly be found, made, or replaced by cheaper means here on earth?
Space mining doesn't make sense! We can't even justify exploiting all known resources here on earth itself because they aren't profitable, how do you work those numbers when, instead of literal slave labor, you have to pay the energy cost of going up and then back down for every kilo of matter?
If it's often not worth it to mine literal gold here on earth because it can't be profitably extracted, the core limit on gold mines as an investment and business venture, why would it be profitable to, for example, mine that gold on Mars and try to bring it home?
The ability to manufacture in space, when the price to orbit is about 3000 $/kg can be very lucrative.
Just refuelling in orbit for long-range missions, with the fuel coming from the moon (aluminium-oxygen for exemple) would be a game-changer, and the ressources to make it happen are not that out of reach.
So bloody frustrating and completely unsurprising.
2. Use some of it for good science even if you don't want to improve welfare and healthcare.
3. Profit and prosper!
That cancelled program became famous for leaving behind an already bought launcher that now will fly mass simulator
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCgC1yA7_w
Sounds great to me.
Do it !
More seriously some Starship related stuff may work one day?
It would jeopardize important national security projects like the White House Ballroom, the Triumphal Arch, the Garden of Heroes and National Golf Course, and of course the Donald J. Trump Center for The Performing Arts (formerly The Memorial To That Loser That Got Assassinated.)
Put another way, I’m pretty sick and tired of planing 30 year long missions, with all the money an engineering and human resources, for rocks.
It was almost certainly not going to tell us conclusively about past life on mars. And if it could, let humans collect it.
The next person who suggests an $11B mission for rocks should get smacked with a yardstick.
Excuse my French
They should open NASA's version of a gofundme page. =3
Flying to Mars and then flying back is incredibly complicated and much more expensive. Rather than sending an exploratory rover or a satellite, you have to basically send an entire launch vehicle when we've never launched anything into orbit from Mars before. And it has to operate essentially autonomously (for the launch).
Even missions to get samples from comets and asteroids are far less complicated because you're not dropping into a gravity well with just enough atmosphere to cover all your stuff in dust but not enough for atmospheric braking. Mars has the exact wrong amount of atmosphere.
Obviously samples returned from Mars would be better but it diminishes the value when we already have samples here. So the huge price tag and incredible engineering complexity becomes harder to justify.
[1]: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/martian-meteorites-rare-visit...
We have Mars rocks at home.
> Obviously samples returned from Mars would be better
The Mars rocks at home.
I was holding my breath for Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope which amazingly wasn't cancelled but they did cancel its successor, the Habitable Worlds Observatory Space Telescope which would be able to spot earth-sized exo-planets
even though Congress already funded it, because somehow the executive is allowed to illegally pocket veto Congress over and over again past two years
it's all Heritage Foundation and Russell Vought, he has no use for science and education
Congress awarded it $150 Million
so Vought or someone in the cabinet pocketed that and gave it $5 Million instead
They can't do anything with $5 Million, that's their point
That's one tomahawk missile
Imagine what NASA could have done with the $1000 MILLION PER DAY being spent on bombing Iran to no purpose or result
Nancy Grace only happened because it was a refurbished second spy telescope built but never launched by the NSA, basically a Hubble pointed at earth
HWO needs to be built from scratch because detecting non-light-emitting earth-sized planets is a technological miracle not even possible this decade at any price
It was meant for 2040 but now I won't live long enough to see it even if the next Congress re-funds it
What makes you think the poster you responded to agrees with the Iran war expense? He simply commented on how difficult it is to cut anything from the Federal budget. He's right. Remember when all the lunatics were out keying Teslas a few short months ago?
I can guarantee you that China will bring back samples before the US, simply because their program was built to bring back results, practically, while NASA's was meant to subsidize PHDs of people involved, while baiting people with "aliens!!!!1", there is no reason why the state should be funding the PHDs of people involved with niche/weird research rather than focus on what the vast majority want and support NASA for.
You can have obscure research as a side mission, not the core, while blatantly lying too.
Mars has a little bit less gravity than Earth
How big would a rocket need to be even to send a small payload (let's think 20kg/45lb) even suborbitally so that it can be caught by another spaceship
Now check how big a rocket has to be to send all of that from Earth
You'd probably have to send this on Starship. And refuel it while on orbit
That paper outlines a plan to do it, which people have been trying to do since the 70s
Here is one that will launch soon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-3
Yeah still looks like an overcomplicated project
Maybe that's why China can make it work
And I mean I agree, for that much money we should be doing missions to Europa instead.