Months after deciding that its previous plan for bringing samples back from Mars wasn’t going to work, NASA says it’s working out the details for two new sample return scenarios, with the aim of bringing 30 titanium tubes filled with Martian rocks and soil back to Earth in the 2030s.
One scenario calls for using a beefed-up version of NASA’s sky crane to drop the required hardware onto the Red Planet’s surface, while the other would use heavy-lift commercial capabilities provided by the likes of SpaceX or Blue Origin.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the space agency plans to flesh out the engineering details for each option over the course of the next year and make its choice in 2026. But that all depends on what Congress and President-elect Donald Trump’s administration want to do.
Nelson noted that China is planning to launch a Mars sample return mission in 2028.
“I don’t think we want the only sample return coming back on the Chinese spacecraft, and that’s just simply a grab-and-go kind of mission, whereas ours has been a very methodical process. … I think that the administration will certainly conclude that they want to proceed, so what we wanted to do was to give them the best possible options so that they can go from here,” he told reporters.
For years, NASA has been working on a plan that started out with the collection and caching of samples by the Perseverance rover in Mars’ Jezero Crater, which is considered prime territory for harboring potential evidence of ancient life. Those samples would have been gathered up and brought to a sample retrieval platform, where they would have been sent into Martian orbit on a rocket known as the Mars Ascent Vehicle. The samples would be transferred to a Mars orbiter built by the European Space Agency. That orbiter would then deliver the samples back to Earth for laboratory study.
It was a complex plan, and last year, NASA determined that the operation would have taken until 2040 to get the samples back, with a price tag of $11 billion. “That was just simply unacceptable,” Nelson said.
NASA asked its experts as well as commercial space ventures to come up with ideas for lowering the cost and speeding up the schedule, which resulted in the two options presented today.
The sky crane option would build upon the technology that used a rocket-powered, free-flying platform to lower NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to the Martian surface. “You’re looking at cost in the range of $6.6 billion to $7.7 billion,” Nelson said.
The estimated price tag for the commercial heavy-lift option is in the range of $5.8 billion to $7.1 billion. “You all know that SpaceX and Blue Origin have already been ones that have expressed an interest, but it could be others as well, and a team is evaluating and researching all industry capability to include the schedule and the budget to determine the best strategy going forward,” Nelson said.
Both options would use many of the same elements proposed under the previous plan, but would trim costs by using a smaller Mars Ascent Vehicle as well as a simpler design for the sample retrieval platform, powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator rather than solar panels. The samples would be brought back from Mars and sent down to Earth by ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter. NASA said ESA is currently evaluating the options proposed by NASA.
The newly proposed schedule could lead to launches in the 2030-31 time frame, and delivery of the samples by as early as 2035. “But it could go out to 2039,” Nelson said. “Now, a good reason for why it could get extended out is if the Congress and the new administration do not respond.”
Nelson said Congress would have to commit at least $300 million during the current fiscal year to keep the Mars sample return campaign on track. “If they want to get this thing back on a direct return earlier, they’re going to have to put more money into it, even more than $300 million in fiscal year ’25, and that would be the case every year going forward,” he said.
Trump has been bullish on Mars exploration, in part due to the influence of SpaceX founder Elon Musk. So bullish, in fact, that Trump wants to have astronauts on the Red Planet by 2028, potentially forcing another overhaul of the Mars sample return campaign.
“We will reach Mars before the end of my term,” Trump said during a campaign rally last October. “Elon promised me he was going to do that. … He told me that we’re going to win, and he’s going to reach Mars by the end of our term, which is a big thing. Before China, before anybody.”