NASA’s Perseverance rover has been busily scraping up Martian soil and caching it in metal tubes for future retrieval and return to Earth, but the task may be too expensive for the government. Can a private company do it instead?
The Mars Sample Return program has been through an ugly summer, with a leaked cost forecast of more than $9 billion, and the US Senate is threatening to cancel the program unless its total cost will be less than $5.3 billion. At NASA’s behest, an unprecedented second independent review is considering whether the mission can actually be done at a realistic price.
Bringing back the first samples from Mars has long been the top priority of space scientists, but now even some enthusiasts fear that doing so could jeopardize other programs to study the solar system. At the same time, NASA has committed significant resources to the Artemis Moon program.
An ambitious, over-budget project and a host of competing priorities—the mood is reminiscent of 2006, when the Bush administration faced a difficult choice between its own Moon program and replacing the Space Shuttle’s job supplying the the International Space Station. NASA’s COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Service) program took a relatively small $500 million tranche of funding and partnered with private companies to develop new spacecraft for the job; the result was SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Dragon, and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft.
This model of private companies commercializing public technologies was so effective, it was expanded to transporting people to the space station, and now scientific payloads and astronauts to the surface of the Moon. While SpaceX’s Crew Dragon has been a success, Boeing still hasn’t delivered on its partnership with NASA to fly astronauts. Meanwhile, the jury is still out on NASA hiring private companies for Moon missions: The first robotic landing attempts are expected later this year.
“I love the idea of funding a sample return in a COTS-like manner with a couple of competitors,” says Abhi Tripathi, a former NASA and SpaceX engineer who is now the director of mission operations at the University of Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab. “It also has a...‘capture the flag’ element to it to get those samples back first.”
The challenge is that no one has ever returned a sample from Mars. The mission is complex—it will require a spacecraft to travel to Mars, another to land safely there and obtain the samples, and a third to rocket them back to Earth. Conversely, the tasks given to private companies by NASA thus far had already been accomplished with 1960s technology, creating an easier path to replicate them on the cheap.
Alan Lindenmoyer, a former NASA official who led the COTS program, says the keys to a successful partnership lie in ensuring that the technology is sufficiently understood to be commercialized and that there are customers besides NASA for the final product. SpaceX uses the Falcon 9 to launch satellites of all stripes and the Dragon to fly private astronauts, while the companies delivering payloads to the Moon are also seeking similar work from universities and foreign governments.
“In my opinion, the [Mars Sample Return] project doesn’t appear to fit well with these enabling conditions,” Lindenmoyer told Quartz in an email. “Companies would have to find a way to spin off secondary products or services to make a sustainable profit from the venture if they are expected to have skin in the game. Not sure how many customers there are for microscopic Martians!”
Still, there are companies that might entertain such a partnership. SpaceX has its sights set on Mars, and already considered a Mars landing before canning the idea to focus on NASA’s pressing need for orbital transportation. Relativity Space and Impulse Space, two companies founded by SpaceX alums, are already plotting a minimalist mission to Mars as a proof of concept for their technology. And Lockheed Martin, the only private company to land a robot on Mars, has begun experimenting with partnership business models near the Moon.
For now, all eyes are on the independent review being conducted by Orlando Figueroa, a retired NASA Mars expert. Jack Kiraly, the head of government relations for the Planetary Society, an NGO that advocates for space exploration, says that despite budget fears, “there’s a very strong chance this mission survives and continues to make progress toward that 2028 launch... 25 years of Mars science has built up to this moment.”
Public-private partnerships succeed in part because they can embrace risk in ways that NASA-led tech development can’t. The program hiring private companies to look for lunar water was designed to include some likely failures, but the space agency is unlikely to accept the potential loss of a flagship mission like this one.
But if those private Moon landers do work out, or if the Senate is serious about its cuts, the powers that be may be forced to consider MOTS—Mars-Optimized Transportation Services. (Please send preferred acronyms for this made up program my way.)
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IMAGERY INTERLUDE
Speaking of Mars, I’ve been digging some images created by Andrea Luck, who used data from the European Space Agency’s Mars orbiter to create this view of the moon Phobos in orbit above to the Red Planet.
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SPACE DEBRIS
Falcon Heavy scrubs ahead of launch. SpaceX hasn’t said why it halted last night’s attempt to launch Echostar’s Jupiter-3, the largest private communications satellite ever built, but it is expected to try again today. The spacecraft’s 500 gbps of throughput is intended to boost Echostar’s satellite internet business as chairman Charlie Ergen considers reuniting it with his other firm, Dish.
Boeing’s Starliner losses now more than $1.1 billion. During its earnings call this week, the aerospace giant announced an additional $257 million in write-offs due to delays, while NASA is still waiting for more information to determine when the long-awaited vehicle will take flight.
Lockheed Martin and BWXT to build nuclear rocket. NASA and DARPA announced the two contractors that will realize plans to demonstrate a fission-powered propulsion system in space no earlier than 2027.
Lynk challenges direct-to-device rival. Lynk CEO Charlies Miller said his satellites connected two ordinary mobile phones during a voice call, and called into question competitor ASTSpaceMobile’s claims to have done the same in April.
Congress rejects satellite bill. The US House of Representatives voted down a bill that would have updated satellite licensing rules because, in their view, it gave the Federal Communications Commission too much power to regulate space safety.
Avi Agonistes. Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophyscist who popularized the dubious theory that an unusual space object was actually an alien-constructed solar sail, is now being criticized by fellow scientists after claiming to recover wreckage of an interstellar probe from beneath the ocean.
Last week: What does racing yachts have to do with launching rockets?
Last year: Artemis 1 will kick off NASA’s return to the Moon.
This was issue 189 of our newsletter. Hope your week is out of this world! Please send your preferred solutions to the MSR mess, tips, and informed opinions to tim@qz.com.