NASA announced Friday that it will award contracts to seven companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, to study how to more cheaply transport rock samples from Mars back to Earth.
The space agency in April put out a call for industry to propose ideas on how to return the Martian rocks to Earth for less than $11 billion and before 2040 the cost and timeline for NASA’s existing Mars Sample Return plan (MSR). A NASA spokesperson told Ars that the agency had received 48 responses to the invitation and had selected seven companies to conduct more detailed studies.
Each company will receive up to $1.5 million for their 90-day investigations. Five of NASA’s chosen companies are among the agency’s list of major contractors, and their inclusion in the research contracts is no surprise. Two other winners are smaller companies.
Mars Sample Return is a top priority for NASA’s Planetary Science Division. The Perseverance rover currently on Mars will collect several dozen specimens of rock powder, soil and Martian air in cigar-shaped titanium tubes to eventually return to Earth.
“Mars Sample Return will be one of the most complex missions NASA has undertaken, and it is critical that we execute it faster, with less risk and at a lower cost,” said Bill Nelson, NASA administrator. “I’m excited to see the vision these companies, centers and partners present as we look for fresh, exciting and innovative ideas to uncover the red planet’s great cosmic secrets.”
Who is in?
Lockheed Martin, the only company to have built a spacecraft that can successfully land on Mars, will “conduct rapid mission design studies for Mars Sample Return,” according to NASA. Northrop Grumman also won a contract for its proposal: “High TRL (Technology Readiness Level) MAV (Mars Ascent Vehicle) Propulsion Trades and Concept Design for MSR Rapid Mission Design.”
These two companies were partners in developing the solid-fuel Mars Ascent Vehicle for NASA’s existing Mars Sample Return mission. The MAV is the rocket that will propel the capsule containing the rock samples from the Martian surface back into space to begin the months-long journey back to Earth. Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman’s involvement in NASA’s Mars program, along with the research scope proposed in Northrop’s proposal, suggests that they will propose applying existing capabilities to solve the Mars Sample Return program.
Aerojet Rocketdyne, best known as a provider of rocket propulsion systems, will study a high-performance liquid-fueled Mars Ascent Vehicle using what it says are “highly reliable and mature propulsion technologies to improve program affordability and scheduleability.”
SpaceX, a company with a long-term vision for Mars, also won NASA funding for a study contract. The research proposal was titled “Enabling Mars Sample Return with Starship.” SpaceX is already designing the privately funded Starship rocket with Mars missions in mind, and Elon Musk, the company’s founder, has predicted that Starship will land on Mars by the end of the decade.
Musk is known to have missed schedule predictions with Starship before, and a landing on the red planet before the end of the 2020s still seems unlikely. However, the giant rocket would enable delivery to Mars and the eventual return of tens of tons of cargo. A successful test flight of Starship this week proved that SpaceX is making progress toward this goal. Yet there is still a long way to go.
Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, will also receive funding for a study it calls “Leveraging Artemis for Mars Sample Return.”
SpaceX and Blue Origin each have multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA to develop Starship and the Blue Moon lander as human-rated spacecraft to transport astronauts to and from the lunar surface as part of the Artemis program.
Two other small companies, Quantum Space and Whittinghill Aerospace, will also conduct studies for NASA.
Quantum, which describes itself as a space infrastructure company, was founded in 2021 by entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian, who also founded Intuitive Machines and Axiom Space. No details are known about the scope of the study, known as the ‘Quantum Anchor Leg Mars Sample Return Study’. Perhaps the “anchor leg” refers to the final stage of returning monsters to Earth, like the anchor in a relay race.
Whittinghill Aerospace, based in California, has only a handful of employees. It will conduct a rapid design study for a single-stage Mars Ascent Vehicle, NASA said.
Missing from the list of contract winners was Boeing, which pushed the use of NASA’s super-expensive Space Launch System to carry out the Mars Sample Return mission with a single launch. Boeing, of course, builds most of the SLS rocket. Most other sample return concepts require multiple launches.
In addition to the seven industry contracts, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) will also produce studies on how to complete the Mars Sample Return mission more cheaply.
JPL is the lead center responsible for managing NASA’s existing concept for Mars Sample Return, in collaboration with the European Space Agency. However, cost growth and delays prompted NASA officials to decide in April to take a different approach.
Nicola Fox, head of NASA’s science directorate, said in April that she hopes “out of the box” concepts will allow the agency to return the samples to Earth in the 2030s, rather than 2040 or later. “This is definitely a very ambitious goal,” she said. “We will have to look for some very innovative new design options and certainly leave no stone unturned.”
NASA will use the results of these ten studies to develop a new approach for Mars Sample Return later this year. Most likely, the architecture that NASA ultimately chooses will be a mix and match of various elements from industry, NASA centers and the European Space Agency, which remains a committed partner on Mars Sample Return with the Earth Return Orbiter.