NASA is calling on industry players to come up with an alternative plan to return rocky samples from Mars at a lower cost and an earlier date.
The space agency has been struggling with its Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, an ambitious plan to pick up Martian dust and rocks collected by the Perseverance rover and drop it off on Earth. On Monday, NASA announced that it was soliciting ideas from the space industry, as well as the larger community of different NASA centers, for a revised plan for the mission. The space agency is calling for proposals for a tried-and-true, less complex mission architecture that would lower cost and bring back the samples at an earlier date.
“We are looking at out-of-the-box possibilities that could return the samples earlier and at a lower cost,” Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said during Monday’s teleconference. “This definitely is a very ambitious goal and we’re going to need to go off to some very innovative new possibilities for a design...so we are requesting assistance from the NASA community to work together to develop a revised plan that utilizes innovation and proven technology.”
NASA’s MSR has been under heavy scrutiny for going over its original budget and timeline. Originally, the mission was capped at a $7 billion budget to return the samples in the 2030s. As of today, however, MSR requires an $11 billion budget, with an estimate of returning the samples by 2040. “The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during the teleconference.
In September 2023, an independent review board (IRB) issued its final report on MSR, referring to it as a “highly constrained and challenging campaign,” with “unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning.” In light of the report, NASA announced that it was considering an alternative architecture for its complex mission and formed a response team to address the findings of the report and paused the program while trying to sort out its budgeting.
The mission received $822.3 million in the 2023 spending bill and NASA requested $949.3 million for Mars Sample Return in its budget proposal for 2024. In April, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson revealed that the Mars Sample Return mission needs an additional $250 million in the current fiscal year, plus another $250 million in 2024, to stay on track for launch in 2028.
“It is possible to bring the samples back quicker than 2040, it just requires a much higher annual budget,” Fox said. “That does not fit with the current environment that we have.” NASA’s 2024 budget was $2.31 billion short of what the space agency was hoping to receive, although it was already bracing for budget cuts due to the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
In response to Gizmodo’s question over whether NASA would have gone with the same mission architecture if a bigger budget was available, it was unclear where the two NASA officials stood. “The mission did have some challenges in both cost and schedule, so we were already taking a pause regardless of the budget environment,” Fox said.
Nelson, on the other hand, chimed in to state that NASA was “put in this situation because of the cutbacks by Congress...and that’s what we are having to respond to.”
NASA will put out its call for proposals on Tuesday, with a due date of May 17. By fall, the space agency is hoping to have all the information needed to make a decision and select a partner for the MSR mission. It’s a fast turn around for a highly complex mission, which is why NASA is hoping to rely on technology that has already been proven to work.
“What we’re hoping is that we will be able to get back to some more traditional tried-and-true architectures, things that do not require huge technological leaps but that have high heritage and thereby we can lower the the risk and the cost and also the time for development,” Fox said. “Anything requiring huge leaps in technology, usually from experience, takes a lot of time.”
And that’s obviously time that NASA does not have as it prepares to send human missions to the Moon, with plans to land the first humans on Mars by the 2040's.
“We are operating from the premise that this is an important national objective that we return these samples,” Nelson said. “When we do, that will allow us in planning where astronauts go on Mars.”
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