Mars Sample Return got a new price tag. It’s big

NASA’s audacious Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission has serious technical flaws and “unrealistic” assumptions about its budget and timetable, an independent review found in a report released yesterday. Originally estimated to cost some $4 billion, the reviewers found that NASA’s share of the mission could end up costing between $8 billion to $11 billion, and that launch could happen no sooner than 2030, 2 years later than now planned.

A joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), MSR would gather rocks collected by the Perseverance rover, which has been drilling samples since it landed on Mars in 2020. MSR would then rocket the samples off the planet and ferry them to Earth, where scientists would study them for signs of past life and planetary evolution. The top priority of planetary science for several decades, it remains a worthy goal and one still worth pursuing, especially in light of similar sample return plans for Mars planned by China for later this decade, according to the review report, which was commissioned by NASA.

But NASA won’t get there without dramatically rethinking how it runs the program and accepting the true cost. “MSR was established with unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning,” the report says. “As a result, there is currently no credible, congruent technical, nor properly margined schedule, cost, and technical baseline that can be accomplished with the likely available funding.” And proposed NASA budgets simply do not provide the funding needed to make the mission happen, it adds.

The simplest solution would be taking current plans, which are “intelligently constructed,” and shift them from 2028 to a 2030 launch window to reach Mars. Those added years would increase overall costs from $8 billion to $9.6 billion, and would mean multiple years when NASA would need to devote more than $1 billion to the mission, putting further strain on an already strained planetary science budget.

Other options would include splitting the mission’s massive Sample Return Lander into two landers, one carrying the rocket to fire the samples into orbit and the other fetch rovers to retrieve samples. These could have lower annual costs and staggered launches, although the overall mission would still end up in the same price range, potentially even reaching $11 billion, and run further into the 2030s. NASA needs to step back and “examine other potential architectures,” the report adds, “to determine whether there are options that offer greater technical robustness and schedule resilience.”

The 16-person review panel, led by Orlando Figueroa, NASA’s former director of Mars exploration, goes beyond budget issues in its critique. It finds the distributed nature of the project has led to confusion among the multiple NASA centers involved and recommends giving centers clear authority over their parts of the project—including trusting that ESA will deliver its part, a spacecraft that will carry the samples back to Earth. It also recommends merging MSR back into NASA’s overall Mars Exploration Program, and selecting one leader to shepherd the project, with direct access to NASA leadership.

The report also strongly supports collecting the samples that are onboard Perseverance, rather than the backup cache of 10 samples the rover finished laying down earlier this year. The rocks now being drilled by Perseverance at the rim of Jezero crater could be just as scientifically valuable as those already gathered, it notes, containing “material of exceptional diversity.” And the spherical sample container that will hold the rocks needs to have its design finalized as soon as possible, as nearly every part of the mission depends on its specifications.

NASA has work to do to convince everyone of MSR’s worth, including some of its own scientists, who fear MSR will further eat into their own projects. “NASA must address this concern while clarifying and dispelling the notion that cancelling MSR necessarily means greater budgets for everybody else,” the report says. “Cancellation may also call into question the feasibility of other ambitious sample return efforts envisioned by the planetary science community.”

MSR’s future is far from assured. The Senate has already expressed skepticism about its rising costs, and raised the specter of cancellation. In the wake of the report, NASA has pledged to complete by early next year a review of the program led by Sandra Connelly, its deputy science chief.