(CN) — 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.
Per analyses of the current program, bringing back the samples of Martian soil, rocks and atmosphere would cost up to $11 billion, Nelson said. Worse, they wouldn't arrive on Earth until at least 2040.
"It's the decade of the 2040s that we're going to be landing astronauts on Mars," Nelson said. "It's also unacceptable, $11 billion dollars."
The Mars Sample Return Mission is seen by NASA officials as a major step in to sending astronauts to the red planet. Nelson called it an "important national objective" for the United States. NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021, has been collecting multiple samples over the past three years in the hopes that they can be sent back to Earth sometime in the future.
They would be the first samples ever brought to Earth from another planet, not counting the natural meteorites that land here occasionally. Other sample return missions have retrieved material from the moon, comets and asteroids.
A decadal survey released by the National Academy of Sciences in April 2022 projected that the Mars Sample Return Mission would cost closer to $5.3 billion dollars, and hopefully return samples sometime in the early 2030s.
But a September 2023 report from an independent NASA review board found that the mission cost and timeframe estimates were "unrealistic" from the start.
"MSR is a deep-space exploration priority for NASA, in collaboration with [the European Space Agency]," the report's authors wrote. "However, MSR was established with unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning. MSR was also organized under an unwieldy structure."
The mission plan which the review board deemed unrealistic involved a NASA robot landing on Mars and collecting Perseverance's samples — possibly using helicopter drones — then placing them in a sealed container atop the so-called Mars Ascent Vehicle. This two-stage, solid-fuel rocket would then launch like a surface-to-air missile and carry the samples into Mars's orbit.
From there, a European Space Agency spacecraft called the Earth Return Orbiter would capture the orbiting sample container and head back to Earth. The spacecraft itself ironically would never return to Earth, but instead would launch the sample container so that it landed in the continental U.S. for pickup.
While NASA had hoped to commence this mission by 2027 or 2028, the review board's report said there was "a near-zero probability" that would happen. The 2023 report also noted, as did Nelson, that the project is constrained by the political and budget priorities of the Biden administration and national lawmakers.
In light of these constraints the NASA administrator said he would seek help from private partners and other groups associated with the space agency, like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, in order to redesign the sample return mission so it aligned more closely with the decadal survey's projections. Otherwise, Nelson said, the high costs would force NASA to "cannibalize" its other programs, like the "Dragonfly" quadcopter being developed to explore Saturn's moon Titan.
"I have asked our folks to reach out with a request for information to industry, to JPL, and to all NASA centers and to report back this fall an alternate plan that would get [samples] back quicker and cheaper," Nelson said. "And try to stay within those limits that the decadal survey said that we should."
The implicit invitation for private actors to join the project also attracted the attention of SpaceX founder and majority owner Elon Musk. In response to NASA announcing the sample return mission setback, Musk boasted on the platform X, formerly Twitter, that SpaceX Starship rockets could "return serious tonnage from Mars within ~5 years."
NASA did not publicly respond to Musk's tweet. The Starship rockets are already deeply involved with NASA's Artemis program and its aim to return astronauts to the moon by 2026, though a November 2023 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office partially blamed issues with Starship's "Human Landing System" for likely delaying a crewed moon landing until at least 2027.
Despite the setbacks, Nelson said NASA was committed to retrieving Mars samples, hopefully at least 30 tubes of them. Scientists will deliberate carefully when choosing which samples to return to Earth, said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, particularly if collecting 30 samples proves infeasible.
"This is not just a grab-a-rock mission, these are very carefully scientifically curated and selected samples," Fox, who joined Nelson on the Monday press call, told reporters.
Fox declined to specify exactly what scientists will look for when selecting the samples, but assured there would be a "range" of them.
"All I can say is I'm really looking forward to the discussions about which samples we bring back," Fox said.
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