NASA has something rather ambitious in the works, and no, it’s not putting celebrities on the Moon, although with a bit more budget the agency could probably give Elon Musk a run for his money. Instead, the American space agency is hoping to bring home some souvenirs. Very dusty, scientifically priceless, and quite possibly older than your great-great-great-grandmother’s crusty china cabinet pieces, these souvenirs are rocks from Mars collected by the Perseverance rover during its archaeological jog through the Jezero Crater.
However, in a plot twist worthy of a budget season sitcom, NASA’s plan to retrieve those Martian rocks by 2040 has stumbled over what can best be described as several awkwardly shaped bureaucratic hurdles. A recent independent review conducted by a panel that clearly knows how to read a spreadsheet concluded that the current Mars Sample Return mission is, in official terms, financially unhinged. Estimates suggest it would cost somewhere between $8 billion and $11 billion, which is a lot even by the standards of fancy space adventures, and might lead a few senators to clutch at their fiscal pearls.
Naturally, NASA is now going back to the drawing board, possibly accompanied by a stack of empty coffee cups and the echoes of muffled sighs, as it attempts to cook up a new plan that costs less and somehow still manages to bring space rocks across 140 million miles of mostly empty real estate. The agency said the reimagined plan would aim to get samples back in the 2030s, which is a smooth way of saying sometime between next Tuesday and the end of the decade, assuming Congress feels generous at some point in between.
Meanwhile, Perseverance continues to collect samples with the tenacity of a bored vacationer lugging back shells from the beach, storing them carefully in cigar-sized tubes and setting them on the Martian surface like breadcrumbs for future robots who will probably drawn the short straw in space mission assignments.
“We need to look outside the box to find a solution,” said Sandra Connelly, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for science. Which, in NASA speak, means someone is opening a lot of expensive-looking PowerPoint files.
NASA has opened the floor to ideas from industry and other space agencies. This is not so much a call for help as it is an open invitation to anyone who thinks they can defy physics on a budget, preferably one that would buy a nice house rather than an interplanetary retrieval system.
The European Space Agency is still in on the mission and remains, at least publicly, optimistic. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, was not invited to participate, perhaps wisely given current geopolitical tensions and a general lack of enthusiasm for PR crises involving Mars rocks.
If all this Martian rock drama sounds faintly familiar, it is because the whole situation smacks of that time one friend promised to move your sofa and now it’s been sitting in your garage for three years. Sure, the intent was noble, but the logistics are proving significantly more complicated than anyone cared to admit at the beginning.
Still, NASA remains committed to returning the samples, insisting they are vital for understanding Mars, planetary formation and maybe even whether life once existed on the Red Planet, or just had a very good run selling sandpaper in bulk.
Mars might be 140 million miles away, but when it comes to budget planning, it turns out the real distance is between intention and appropriation.