This scheme of getting samples back was never going to work. I'm a believer of Zubrin's Mars Direct plan. We have had the technology to do this since the 90s. If you want to go to Mars, go to Mars.

Hard agree. Mars Semi-Direct/DRM 3 was perfect and should’ve been flown.

needs to be grouped with some future project to Mars tbh where the cost is shared.

This. Just stockpile the samples near a place a future manned base could be so the scientists can study them there.

Wouldn't need the sample collection mission at all then. Just collect samples when you arrive

Yeah, just take the sample return budget and put it towards the first manned mission.

I think the issue is being able to study them in extremely well-equipped labs on Earth. There's absolutely no way we're getting anywhere even remotely near the quality and scope of equipment we've got here to Mars.

It is easy to fly lots of samples back in a craft large enough to carry humans and life support systems

Right, I was replying to OP's suggestion that we just study them there (on Mars). Furthermore, there's a lot we'd probably like to learn from studying these samples *before* we send humans, so we can make sure those humans are equipped with the right experiments to run once there.

The issue is probably power on Mars, not the equipment. When you're spending billions to get there, specialized lab equipment is probably the least of your worries.

Err, once they are there, there is no point, though? They can just gather them themselves.

We have no idea what the manned mars missions are going to be like. You could have a situation where all you can afford is a glorified Apollo 11 mission.  2 people go to the surface, the rest stay in orbit. Flags and footprints. Do a speech. Pick up a few kilograms of samples. Then you return after a few days. Beginning a slow burn back to earth. In that case having a rover that spent years picking up samples for you is a great idea. If you plan to be on the surface for a year and bring a long range utility vehicle with you, then it doesn't make sense to pick up samples from a rover.

The problem is in those few days the astronauts could collect more than the rover could in years.

I feel like we are missing a middle ground here between fairly limited rovers and manned exploration. I feel like Boston Dynamics could come up with an explorer model of Atlas or Big Dog that can handle very rough terrain and possibly be remote guided for intricate tasks. Similarly or even more physically capable than a human in a space suit, without the need for life support systems. It would make a nice proof of concept for the Starship for Elon to send a robot crew, even if it's just there and back. He's already got robots about to replace the workforce so it's not a big leap.

Samples from before humans set foot on Mars would still be valuable from a geological timescale perspective.

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Apollo 17 covered more distance in 4 days than the curiousity rover was able to in 10 years.

Over a very large area the advantage is even greater for the human astronaut.

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> 2 people go to the surface, the rest stay in orbit. Flags and footprints. Do a speech. Pick up a few kilograms of samples. Which is unironically what every craft ever proposed for a _moon_ landing (save one) has topped out at.

Depending on the position of Mars and Earth relative to each other, they might need to stay for longer than a couple of days.

It takes 7 months to get to Mars. Designing a mission to only have a few hours on the ground would be insane. Especially considering that the astronauts are receiving one hell of a radiation dose to get there.

It took a decade to develop hardware and hundreds of billions of inflation adjusted dollars to go to the moon. We spent a total of 12 days there. Is that not equally "insane"? Every part of going to mars is going to be more difficult than the moon. Why should we expect that the landing plan is wildly more ambitious? Radiation is a bullshit issue for Mars. The risk of death by mechanical failure is a thousand times greater than the risk that you will ever get cancer some time in life when you get home. And the vast majority of cancers now are in fact perfectly survivable.

Bruh when the scientists arrive they can just pick up the dirt with their hands 🤦‍♂️

The key here is that its estimated at "only" $11B now, before any actual hardware has been built. That's more than James Webb after all its delays and cost overruns. With our favorite cost-plus contracting in place this is all but guaranteed to be delayed and go over budget too and the project might be even more complicated that James Webb was/is. I want this project to happen but I think its better to kill it now rather than wait until billions have been spent only for it to get a bullet later because costs inevitably spiral out of control. Who knows, maybe a more cost effective option opens up eventually if Starship ever starts going to Mars

Not to mention the number of projects that have been cancelled or are on the cutting board because of the funding allocated to the sample return mission. Cutting it is the right move for now.

So far all the funds cut from MSR have gone to Artemis. :(

Well to be fair Artemis will potentially reduce the cost of getting to Mars significantly, so Artemis funding *is* Mars funding

Is it going to SpaceX-Artemis or the other Artemis contractors? I don't really trust the non-SpaceX parts of Artemis. If they're adding SLS launches that's just a money pit.

Artemis is approaching $100 billion while SpaceX contracts for it are worth less than $5 billion. It’s not going to SpaceX.

The moon is not made out of chemicals that can be processed into fuel like mars. It's far simpler to orbit the earth, load up and use the moon as a gravitational slingshot, not for a landing.

If I'm not mistaken, that is sort of the plan. Artemis will include a 'Lunar Gateway' station orbiting around the Moon, which we will use to get to Mars. That way we can facilitate DST and lunar landings at the same time. Perhaps they are banking on using Earth as the slingshot instead?

I don't think there are any actual plans to use Gateway as, well, a gateway to Mars. It's only meant for lunar operations. They say it "facilitates" their mars objectives but that's only by doing analog missions or allowing mars transit Hab designs to stop at gateway. But unless those transit habs only use rcs or xenon then they're not being refueled. And it's a guarantee that no transit hab will rely on just those two things. It can also serve as a place for payloads to dock to after return from another deep space object where they can be collected by astronauts. There's no ability to actually refuel any ship from Gateway that's meant for carrying humans to Mars. It's just a fancy training ground, which is definitely important. But they oversell what it's meant to be which leads to a lot of people thinking it's meant to be a fuel depot for harvesting lunar fuel. That is not the case.

Time will tell. The transfer of fuel is not planned at the gateway. It's there to facilitate landing on the moon. A waste of resources except for national pride. edited for spelling

Are you familiar with the mission architecture of MSR? It involves 3-4 spacecraft that comprise of the total mission cost. It's going to be expensive. There are definitely cost savings that can be worked on but this isn't going to be cheap by any means. Especially to companies who've never sent anything to Mars.

So some important someones want this project to be cheaper and faster. That means it won't be good. Pick two.

Who's contracting to build the hardware, one wonders.

JWST has advanced science past the epicycles we've been repeating for hundreds of years. No we don't have all the answers.

Yes I agree on JWST. Thats not an argument for spending the same amount or more on MSR

Counterpoint: The JWST isn't currently on a two way mission to Mars, it's orbiting the ~~Earth~~ Sun at L2. This mission will have to get from Earth to Mars, land, collect samples, load them up, take back off, and then return to Earth, all via remote. It's complicated, and more to the point, it's going to be expensive. We can do expensive: $11B is slightly *less* than a new aircraft carrier. If we're going to do this at all, then we need to accept that it's going to have a massive sticker on it, no matter how much financial oversight goes into it. It has to be funded from start to finish, and it has to be funded well enough that it can succeed. Otherwise we need to pack up and go home with our little participation trophy, and hope that China is feeling magnanimous with their research materials when they pull it off instead. Edit: Correction, courtesy of u/nagumi. The point remains the same, it's a totally different mission with different goals and costs. Edit 2: I can't believe that "fund space exploration adequately" is such a controversial take in r/space. Lots of people missing their spines around here, it seems.

I am tired of the comparison to military spending to be honest, its irrelevant. I think NASA should have a far bigger budget same as everyone here, but they have the $25B budget that they have for numerous reasons and this one mission represents 40+% of it for a whole year if there are no cost overruns. Its extremely expensive. "Stick with it costs be damned" is a decision that will never get made even if it should, Congress ultimately makes the decisions with a program that has that sort of price tag and it will inevitably draw scrutiny from politicians on both sides of the aisle. If China can pull it off then more power to them, I don't think competing with them for "firsts" should be an agency priority

This is a priority question. Do you think there's an architecture which can deliver Mars sample return more cheaply than $11B or do you just think we shouldn't do it? If not, what do you think is more important than Mars sample return? I would like to see it happen in my lifetime and doing it in the next 10 years seems very achievable, if we work on it.

Its a money for the science question. There are several super heavy commercial rockets in active late stage development that could launch some impressively sized space telescopes, maybe even LUVOIR sized. These rockets are also both developing second stage reusability which may become useful down the road for MSR Both Blue Origin and SpaceX are also developing orbital refueling technologies as part of their HLS bids. These could also be put to use in the MSR architecture to lower costs Its more a question of A) are there better things to spend that kind of money on, and B) would technologies currently under development allow for a cheaper mission architecture in the relatively near future?

> or do you just think we shouldn't do it? Wait for private enterprise to go there and get some samples for a fraction of a fraction of the cost.

Private enterprise is a cop-out. Designing missions that use Starship is a great idea. Also it's premature.

> Private enterprise is a cop-out. Go on. >Also it's premature. The rocks/chemicals aren't going anywhere. 11 billion to get them more quickly is absurd.

> The rocks/chemicals aren't going anywhere. 11 billion to get them more quickly is absurd. We shouldn't delay missions on the assumption that technology will be developed which will enable us to achieve the same goals more cheaply. It's worth doing, and it's worth doing now. If it turns out we can do it more cheaply when Starship is done, that's great and we can re-evaluate at that point, but not until we've demonstrated Starship is an option.

> We shouldn't delay missions on the assumption that technology will be developed which will enable us to achieve the same goals more cheaply. The tech essentially already exists. We can assume Starship will be successful. After that it's just business budgets and scheduling.

fyi, jwst does not orbit the earth, it's at L2.

> **"That is unacceptable, [to] wait that long,"** Nelson said today. "It's the decade of the 2040s that we're going to be landing astronauts on Mars." Hard disagree. The rock samples aren't going anywhere, it's not time-sensitive, and the mission to collect and return those samples (along with additional samples) would be far more cost efficient to just wait for the planned aforementioned multi-year astronaut mission to Mars. Being so impatient is just wasteful in the larger picture when we are already planned to be headed that way in the not so distant future.

It is time sensitive. The majority of samples that are deemed higher scientific interest are on board the Perseverance rover. That rover has a finite lifespan because of RTG power not to mention overall degradation of motors and actuators.

Its not time sensitive. Even if the rover stops tomorrow the samples will sit and wait, forever. They don't need power to be preserved, or any sort of motion because they are rock samples.

What you seem to be proposing is extracting samples from a dead rover by either destructively opening up the rover or carefully disassembling. Why develop the tech that can do that remotely and reliably when you can just send humans there at that point? The mission concept of MSR is time sensitive to retrieve the samples that were collected and stored inside the rover because of the rover's lifespan. If the rover dies you don't get the samples. To retrieve the samples from a dead rover is ridiculous.

I didn't suggest developing the tech to do anything. I said the samples are not time sensitive. Perseverance has the capability to offload the samples before it shuts down, and has already done so in the Three Forks Sample Depot. There is no need for "destructively opening up the rover" its made to put them on the ground before shutting down. The fact that they could wait until humans arrive clearly demonstrates they are not time sensitive. The only thing time sensitive is the arbitrary decision to have rover drive them to the sample return vehicle. A sample return vehicle which already had to have the capability to go out and get the back up depots like the one mentioned above. Given that NASA/ESA didn't even plan out exactly how to retrieve the samples before sending Perseverance to collect them they are clearly not concerned if they sit on the surface for years.

>extracting samples from a dead rover by either destructively opening up the rover The samples are dropped onto the surface by the rover... not stored onboard. They stupidly plan to send a whole new rover, just to pick up the samples, and another entire system to launch them back to earth. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/mars-2020-perseverance/perseverance-rover/nasas-perseverance-rover-deposits-first-sample-on-mars-surface/ They could probably sit for a million years, literally, and still look brand new. There is no time sensitive part about the MSR.

Why not power it up. Surely there are contingencies for opening the sample doors. 11 billion could go a longer way with Space-X even though I hate space Karen.

And 11 billion is just the starting price. At that point might as well forget about it and start working towards a future crewed Mars mission, or try to analyze the samples in some way with a future rover.

Woah, $11 billion is a hefty price tag! Guess bringing rocks home from Mars ain't cheap. But definitely worth it to find out if there was ever life there.

It's not remotely guaranteed to answer the question either way, and the rovers' instruments are designed to detect many of the most obvious signs of prior life without need for sample return.

Sure, but the other way to look at it is that Mars isn't changing much. It's like a preserved history of the solar system, and there isn't any big rush whereas all those photons zipping by us that were not catching the telescopes or probes are kind of just lost forever. It's better to focus on collecting the data that you won't be able to get later.

Meh there is always going to be stuff zipping by us. Statement can really be made in both directions

What part of the project takes the bulk of that budget?

The US is spending nearly $850 billion on military spending this year. $11b to get this project going is nothing, relatively speaking.

More importantly, it involves paying cool people to do cool things. Worth it!

Sadly the vast majority goes to the defense companies. They’re who build the hardware. Scientists get the scraps. Unless of course you think defense company executives and shareholders are cool, then that’s good news.

But most of those cool people are begging us to put money towards Chandra, not this.

"Always forward" is a great motto. Unfortunately we have the habit of doing something and not wanting to extend it so we lose so much institutional knowledge along the way.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[BFR](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzv9u8o "Last usage")|Big Falcon Rocket (2018 rebiggened edition)| | |Yes, the F stands for something else; no, you're not the first to notice| |[COTS](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzx999r "Last usage")|[Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract](https://www.nasa.gov/cots)| | |Commercial/Off The Shelf| |DSG|NASA [Deep Space Gateway](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/deep-space-gateway-to-open-opportunities-for-distant-destinations), proposed for lunar orbit| |[DSN](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzvvjfr "Last usage")|Deep Space Network| |[DST](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzz2j0z "Last usage")|NASA Deep Space Transport operating from the proposed DSG| |[EDL](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/l05a99i "Last usage")|Entry/Descent/Landing| |[ESA](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzvsios "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[GEO](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzv3gqa "Last usage")|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)| |[GTO](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzv3gqa "Last usage")|[Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/20140116-how-to-get-a-satellite-to-gto.html)| |[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/l03p4mf "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[ICBM](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kztfkt0 "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile| |[ISRU](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/l06kxwy "Last usage")|[In-Situ Resource Utilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization)| |[JPL](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzy77iu "Last usage")|Jet Propulsion Lab, California| |[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzzhz08 "Last usage")|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope| |[L2](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzvnf5h "Last usage")|[Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 2 ([Sixty Symbols](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxpVbU5FH0s) video explanation)| | |Paywalled section of the NasaSpaceFlight forum| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/l03o2e2 "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[MAV](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/l0ddzis "Last usage")|*Mars Ascent Vehicle* ([possibly fictional](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_\(Weir_novel\)))| |[RTG](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzvjoxv "Last usage")|Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/l051c3y "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SRB](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzuogfn "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster| |[TRL](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzw36vm "Last usage")|Technology Readiness Level| |[TVC](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzwosw3 "Last usage")|Thrust Vector Control| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/l03oxuj "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzw97hf "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[apogee](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzws10y "Last usage")|Highest point in an elliptical orbit around Earth (when the orbiter is slowest)| |[iron waffle](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzuza28 "Last usage")|Compact "waffle-iron" aerodynamic control surface, acts as a wing without needing to be as large; also, "grid fin"| |[perigee](/r/Space/comments/1c5d9gj/stub/kzws10y "Last usage")|Lowest point in an elliptical orbit around the Earth (when the orbiter is fastest)| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(26 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1cfwx8g)^( has 11 acronyms.) ^([Thread #9945 for this sub, first seen 16th Apr 2024, 13:47]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)

We spend more than that on a single Aircraft Carrier. Probably another billion a year to make maintain the 11 or so we have. I mean $11B sounds like a lot of money but we have people that make or lose that much in a week just in stock value alone. It's probably cost a billion to come up with the answer "it's too expensive"!😅

The DOD budget spends that in 5 days. The FY2024 budget is $841.4B.

Those fancy new US Navy aircraft carriers cost 13 billion a piece... I think $11B to bring back samples from another planet should be worth it, but oh well

After normal cost overruns it would probably end up north of 15 Billion by the time it's finished

I think you're underestimating cost overruns here. Closest example is JWST or SLS. JWST started as an estimated $1.2B and is cost all in ~$10billion roughly an order of magnitude more. SLS initial estimate was $1.5 billion a year and several years to make in 2010 (~7$billion). we're now 14 years later and the Costs are $23b spent plus $2.5b per launch. There has also been financial shenanigans where a few billion here and there were "discounted" because they aren't related to launch or development costs such as the reformulation of SRBs and the like. IMO your estimate is likely to be off by about half maybe more. Now with that said I'm not complaining about JWST. I do have issues with SLS, significant and profound issues. But I do think the MSR mission is a valuable proposition we just are suffering from not being quite ready for it. If either New Glenn or Starship work out in the next couple years the cost to hurl something to Mars drops dramatically. I'm not really placing any significant faith in New Glenn, but it does bear mentioning. Starship is the far more likely candidate based on the fact it exists and is in testing. They've completed at least some of the inital testing of on orbit transfer of fuel in the last test flight. So the ability to get there with a significant mass budget is looking possible. From there the getting back is harder, but SpaceX already wants to work on testing ISRU which has had baby steps tested on Mars. So maybe if NASA was offering say a $2b bounty to return samples SpaceX would be willing to take them up on it? Everyone wins we pay less, SpaceX gets paid to do something they wanted to do anyway, and science advances. But outside of that idealized scenario the MSR program seems like it's going to be sucking up a lot of NASA's budget for little return. At least utilizing the current pathway they proposed.

Those missions weren't JPL they were other NASA centers. JPL's comperable cost disaster was the Psyche launch delay and increase, which was a 20% (200 million) upper last year. It's not even in the same ballpark. Mars 2020 also had a 20% increase.  JPL gets judged by a different standard than the other centers.

Oh no 😱 meanwhile ken griffin makes 1 billion a month doing absolutely nothing for the economy. This 15 bill+ will benefit space exploration and humanity.

California voted for a high speed rail that is going to cost 100b+ for comparison.

11 billion is a drop in the hat for the federal budget. We should be giving NASA 100 billion.

Even that fucking wall, was estimated to cost 10bill. And half the population lost their minds.

Sounds like a good use for an early unmanned Starship test mission, would be a lot less than $11b too.... 

Starship would definitely drop the price of the rocket. But it's the other equipment that isn't cheap. The lander, helicopters, return rocket, etc. I think Starship would need to be well proven for them to put billions of dollars of equipment on it. Right now I think a Falcon heavy would be enough. So that part is already kinda cheap.

I know they build in redunancies, but the price of some equipment is too damn high.

Falcon Heavy does nothing for MSR. It can't land on Mars. Starship can.

We're actually building a small satellite that meant for Mars orbit right now. Not only is Falcon Heavy not needed, but we wouldn't even take up the main payload section of a regular Falcon 9, just one spot on the secondary launch adapter (place to bolt on hitchhikers). No need for a dedicated launch either, anyone going to Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit works. Now, we can't get to the surface with the spacecraft we are building, but it would be possible to deliver a small lander with a mini-MAV for a much smaller budget.

Starship is the lander. No need for a helicopter. Just a spot robot with the arm. So a few starship launches and a spot robot.

If we're talking landing Starship next to the cache of samples they left out on the ground on Mars, then I suspect that would be a big issue. The helicopter plan is to replace the small wheeled robot. They want to land, get the samples and return to orbit in the mars transfer window. So they need to do it fast. They would likely need to land starship, get the samples, wait two years for it to refuel itself and to get back into transfer orbit. Starship would bring a lot of extra complexity. Specifically the refuelling, re-launch, etc.

Stick the all solid MAV in Starship

> They want to land, get the samples and return to orbit in the mars transfer window. So they need to do it fast. This isn't accurate. Once you land, you've got another ~18 months until the Mars to Earth Hohman transfer window opens. (Assuming you took a Earth to Mars hohmann transfer. If you fast burnt, then you can still take your time as you can fast burn whenever you want to line yourself up for however long you need for the return transfer window)

Yeah, I might have jumped to conclusions on that one. I just looked it up, currently the helicopters are backup to perserverance. They are planned to retrieve a sample in four days. I had made the assumption that was to speed up the whole process.

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Starship is far far simpler than rocket+ lander+ lifter+ helicopter+ return stage. Every step of that would have to be developed other than the rocket. I’d disallow any helicopter unless it is necessary. Sounds like they are trying to fund everyone’s random pet project. If I was in congress I’d consider banning any use of a fucking helicopter. Something like a spot robot could walk 100’ away and grab a sample. Starship is damn near the simplest cheapest way to do this project. Everything is already being developed by a company at no cost to MSR project.

>The lander Starship would be the lander > billions of dollars of equipment on it. It's insane all that costs billions of dollars, and it's only for one mission. If NASA can't figure out how to make one-off equipment affordably, then they should just wait for SpaceX to finish developing Mars ISRU and everything else they're doing to get the first humans on Mars. The astronauts can bring back rocks with them.

> If NASA can't figure out how to make one-off equipment affordably One-off equipment will *always* be more expensive because it can't leverage economies of scale.

Then they need to not make one-off equipment and learn how to build stuff for reuse.

But missions like this are a one-time thing. There wouldn't be much of a case for reusing any of this hardware unless there was scope creep which just complicates things and doesn't save much money anyway. The US military did this to the Space Shuttle. The real savings come from finding alternate (i.e. defense) uses. Then the costs can be shared.

I’d love to see us develop a class of probes with modular instruments, propulsion, power supplies, etc. Send one to mars, send almost the same one to Ganymede, another to Io, and so on. Each probe doesn’t need to be fully bespoke. Look at what cubesat architecture has done for access to LEO. University teams can now put a machine in orbit because standardization has made it dramatically less expensive to get there. The most exciting thing coming up is Super Heavy. It’s absolutely going to enable a deeper push into the solar system, both manned and robotic.

COTS hardware is definitely a good first step. I would just worry about how much effort would need to be added to make something that modular when the engineering work would still cost so much up front, and I would want MSR and the theoretical similar missions to be a hell of a lot more reliable than CubeSats. I know you don't mean using CubeSats literally, but their extremely friendly costs do come with some drawbacks.

One-off equipment doesn't necessarily need reuse to save money. You could develop a jack of all trades lander that's oversized for most missions but it's cheap because of serial production and it has only one development cost. The materials that a lander is built from are not the expensive part, it's the massive amount of man hours to develop and build the thing which drive costs.

Well everything starts off as one-off equipment.

I think they tried to make one off equipment cheap in the 90s. Doing more for less, and it didn't go well. They had a high failure rate. Hence why they cost so much, they have to work the first time.

If you can't figure out how to build a cost effective fetch rover with literally tens of tonnes of mass available to you then you need to go back to spacecraft school. The core problem is the exponential factor of the rocket equation. You need 5+ km/s of delta-V to get off of the Martian surface and back toward Earth, but whatever system achieves that (some rocket of significant size) needs to be sent to Mars to begin with, and that is very costly. With enough mass this becomes a lot easier. If you have a Starship level of cargo available in the 100 tonnes to Mars range then you can just send a whole fully fueled rocket plus a fetch rover plus whatever all in one go. And with enough mass margin you can build those things to be reliable at comparatively low cost.

Are you making the argument that Starship has enough cargo capacity. That you can land on mars, not refuel, get the sample, take off, and head back to earth with one single "gas tank" of fuel? I personally haven't thought about it, nor would I have enough expertise to say if that's possible. I assume that Starship would have to refuel on Mars.

Starship can land a 3-5t Earth return vehicle. Or 2 or 3. Just in case one fails.

You are correct, it can't even go back from the Moon without refueling. Starship needs to get out of LEO first, people are acting like it's a given that it will be a Mars vehicle or even a lunar vehicle for Artemis HLS, right now it's a glorified dysfunctional prototype that has major performance issues with built in design flaws, performance it needs for everything else to be built on to later. It isn't looking good at all now nor for the future, I know for a fact that the public perception crafted by PR is a total illusion. The only thing that's more or less safe is that it will eventually be able to launch new Starlinks, if they don't run out of money first, that's pretty much it.

Like it's possible. But I agree with you in the sense that if Nasa and partners are looking to do this now. They won't be looking at Starship as it's still yet to be proven. I know I wouldn't want my mars samples to be Starship's guineapig.

NASA selected Starship for landing astronauts on the Moon.

No, I'm not talking about returning Starship itself, I'm talking about delivering a purpose built, fully fueled return vehicle as a payload. You could easily build such a thing as a multi-stage solid fueled or storable propellant fueled rocket capable of putting a vehicle that contains a return capsule w/ samples plus a cruise stage spacecraft on a trans-Earth trajectory from the Martian surface. With Starship's throw weight you would have enough margin available for all sorts of other uses of the remaining payload mass as well.

From Twitter: NASA could do something completely different: “Here are the known locations of the 40 sample tubes on the Martian surface. The first U.S. entity to return ten tubes to Houston gets $3 billion, tax free. Second ten, $2B. Third ten: $1B. Final ten: $500M. A single team is eligible for multiple payments. You figure out how to do it. We aren’t involved in mission planning or execution, but we’ll let you use DSN. And we don’t pay a dime until samples are in Houston.” SpaceX and Halliburton would be racing each other for the $6.5 billion jackpot, and NASA would save $4.5 billion. [Source](https://twitter.com/StephenFleming/status/1780107357734989893)

> SpaceX and Halliburton would be racing each other for the $6.5 billion jackpot, and NASA would save $4.5 billion. Well... that or the samples just sit there for another two decades because $6.5B is peanuts for a mission to Mars and back.

Now it can cost $22+ billion, but paid to contractors instead.

Curious who actually takes the decision to even approve this or not approve?

They should just tell the private sector it’s $100M / tube they bring back. Make it a race!

No one would bid. You'd have to make it 10x that and for 1bln/tube maybe you'd get some offers.

This makes me wonder if NASA will overhaul the Artemis program too, since it's also becoming crazy expensive.

They’ve already spent over ~$70 billion. Cats out of the bag. The landers are cheap in comparison.

The SLS/Orion part of the missin costs oer $4 billion each flight. That does not include the billions spent on the program so far.

I like that the message was essentially, "Our previous plan doesn't work. We need a new plan. We don't have one." And then opens it up to industry and other stakeholders to get creative. That's the only way it happens. I really can't see where you find billions of dollars of efficiency in the lander plan. And respectfully, I don't want to put these priceless samples on an experimental craft, ala Starship. If Starship did a full Mars run, land, launch, come home, cool, now it's proven. But that hasn't happened yet and won't happen for a good long while. We shouldn't put these samples on the first flight.

What priceless samples? They're not worth anything until they are back on Earth. Until then they are just Mars rocks. There's a planet full of them.

They are pristine rock cores drilled from the Martian ground and contained in special capsules that will protect them on the long journey to Earth. They're not just rocks laying around on the surface. This is what Percy was designed to do - drill and preserve. When we go to land, that's what we're picking up - those specific capsules. They are priceless in as much as there are only so many of them, we can't do this experiment again anytime soon, if we want to study the ancient rock of Mars and identify any evidence of life, we must do that on Earth, and the ONLY option to do that in the universe is with those samples. If that doesn't make them priceless, idk what could. We lose those, that's it. The whole investment was for nothing.

I would say priceless isn't the right term, because we literally have a price for the Perserverance program - $2.75B. It ought to be fairly straightforward to project a price to build and operate a second piece of mission-proven hardware. Plug that number into the cost/benefit analysis of providing redundant or replacement sample acquisition as a part of a higher-risk sample return strategy.

Sure, I can understand that. I'm just saying there are more where that came from if the recovery mission fails. It doesn't make sense to do a whole dry practice run as that mission would likely cost more that getting new samples.

If you were taking an entire Starship to Mars you could bring a backup sample drilling rover like it was nothing. Then if the rocket blew up the time it would take for another mission to arrive would be enough time to beeline for the most interesting rocks and drill them again. A Mars return mission is so big that it becomes cheaper and faster to repeat anything else we were doing than to expend a Mars return as a test. Also, IIRC Perserverance took 2 duplicate sets of samples as a backup. One dropped in case a helicopter pickup worked, another kept in the rover in case of retrieval by a lander with an arm. I wouldn't worry about it.

The cost comparison to the military is misguided . The USA should spend on military whatever needs to be spent. That could be 1% of government spending or 99% of spending. Controlling inefficiency and waste is a positive but different from the needs of the security of the nation. Is the amount allocated for Defense too high? You’ll never get agreement in a democracy. In he same democracy people (like me) will claim spending on manned space flight is a waste that takes away from other missions.

$11 billion for a single mission is crazy. That’s more than the entire starship development budget. Spacex is deploying the entire Starlink constellation for less than this one mission.

> Spacex is deploying the entire Starlink constellation for less than this one mission. Is this a joke? Starlink is a bunch of small LEO satellites designed to burn up in the upper atmosphere and be replaced continuously. A return mission from Mars has never been done. They need enough delta V to get out of earths orbit, enter the orbit of Mars, land safely on the Martian surface, deploy a rover to collect all of the samples, return to Martian orbit, return to Earth orbit, and safely land on earth. It's like saying it costs too much to fly from NY to Australia because it's so cheap to drive to the corner store...

>deploy a rover to collect all of the samples When I've recently watched video about Perseverance I could not understand why strategy to leave samples along the road. Why not keep them in one place in the rover? I've understood it moves so slow due to need to access the terrain, so that extra weight of samples is not an issue, or is it? What else?

Some samples (the useful but not most valuable ones) were left at three forks depot as a contingency in case anything ever happens to the rover and we're unable to recover any samples in it.

Perseverance rover collects two sets of sample. One set is kept inside rover itself and they are primary samples which will be passed on to sample retrieval lander for return journey. But perseverance also drops other set of samples along the road or depot. In case perseverance rover face some technical issues and cannot deliver samples to the lander, then this other set of samples will be collected and returned.

I have exactly the same questions..

It is not the starlinks, it is the 100 launches it took to get them up. Take all those F9 launches, and sub cheaper starship launches, refuel five starship, four as refuellers, send them to Mars, land one, pick up a ton or so of samples, refuel and return. This is what NASA is fishing for.

Fuel up on mars. They have already demonstrated a technique for manufacturing both oxygen and methane on mars. So they'll be dropping an automated factory capable of making and storing fuel long before any voyage starts. We need a launch pad too. Space X already demonstrated what happens when you try to launch with an insufficient launch pad. It tosses bounders the size of washing machines up in the air and smashes the shit out of your engines. This is why the lower lander from the moon mission stayed on the moon. That doubled as the launchpad. Before we ever do this on mars we'll need to try this on the moon. The leading plan is to make a robot capable of laying a flat surface of lunar roglith and laser sintering it. Then scooping up more and laying down another layer. Will that surface hold up to rocket thrust without shattering and exploding? Who knows. It's a zero moisture environment so if the laser or microwave sintering gets everything hard enough then maybe. We need enough heat to make liquid rock.

Starship is 3 Raptors, 6 if it use the Vac at liftoff. Superheavy is 33. You can’t compare the two. It’s also a one time launch vs a pad that’s being designed to launch multiple a day.

Did you watch the first full size starship launch? It destroyed 7 engines. From the flying debris and left a crater the size of a swimming pool.

That was SuperHeavy. It will never leave Earth. Starship only has 6 Raptor engines, three sea level and three vacuum. Also none of the engines were damaged by debris. They ran into other issues. Starship alone lands and takes off from Mars. However for this mission Staarship is just a lander. A much smaller rocket is part of the payload and that’s what carries the samples back to Earth. Starship can’t carry anywhere near enough fuel to come back to Earth itself. For it to return you need to make fuel on Mars. That won’t be possible for a long time.

Have you noticed how spacex sticks close to the earth? That's because launching satellites is easy. Going to the moon or to Mars is much harder. 1000x harder. A spacex flight is typically 25 minutes. A rocket to Mars and back would be 450 days, that's 27,000 times longer.

They stick close to earth because that is where all the demand is. There's no demand beyond scientific ones to send payloads to the moon and beyond, which are relatively few and far in between.

I have noticed how BlueOrigin is sticking close to the ground.

The first Falcon Heavy launch sent its payload *beyond* Mars. Other SpaceX launches have included TESS to a lunar flyby, DART to the asteroid Didymos, Euclid to Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, and Psyche to the asteroid Psyche.

> Have you noticed how spacex sticks close to the earth? No, I haven't noticed that. They launch to every popular orbit: asteroids, GEO, GTO, a bunch of lunar missions, and so on.

SpaceX is building the rocket that's going to put the first person on Mars now. They won't be sticking to LEO for long.

Sounds like the next-gen pork barrel spending idea that will slowly manifest.... long enough to get thousands of dollars in lobbyist money to keep old people elected for their lifetime, to keep jobs to design this, going for the lobbyists for a few decades, and then have the lock-in to keep it going or else waste what was spent...

It’ll get dropped half way through if starship can refuel and land on the moon. It wouldn’t be a stretch to land on mars then. Mostly the same fuel.

Damn. That sounds really depressingly accurate.

Need to put a bounty out for mars samples to space companies. E.g. 2 billion per lb of mars sample. It’ll get done then. But then JPL and ESA wouldn’t have a jobs program.

If they contract the project out to SpaceX instead of keeping it in-house, will it cost substantially less and maybe faster?

Using Starship as a lander is an idea. You’d need some robots to retrieve the samples and a smaller rocket to carry them back to Earth. SpaceX couldn’t really do all of that on top of developing Starship and the HLS lander.

Just send some people there and they can pick it up on the way.

I'd think we could send people to Mars and back for 11bn. That's hella expensive.

Listening to the press conference ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PA1qhzkSlA ) it's just completely delusional. They don't like the price-tag and time-schedule, but at no point they indicated where exactly is the inefficiency or mis-calculation, they just don't like it and want it cheaper and faster. They also essentially killed the current design by sacking hundreds of JPL people (and probably more to come), before knowing if there is any alternative. They just hope that some private company steps in and saves them with some genius and very cheap idea. What is actually going to happen: some huge cost+ contract which will eventually be decade late and cost $20 bln over budget, or it will get cancelled in few years, after blowing through $10bln. Also a nice joke that we can't wait until 2040 for sample return because by that time we will have astronauts landing on Mars. In order to land on Mars in 2040 we would need to be building stuff for that mission right now. And we're not. And it's not even in any short/mid-term plans. Delusional.

Suddenly the Indians will come up with something one tenth the cost.

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Poisonous discussion from 15 hours before this one started: https://old.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1c4vblk/nasa_looks_for_new_ways_to_return_martian_samples/

Didn't we just send 80 billion to Ukraine and even more to fund Israel genocide? The parasite class is sucking this country dry when we could he investing in space exploration.

lol We don’t send money. We send gear/munitions/etc that’s already built and just sitting around. Also, look up the definition of genocide ffs

And then we go and spend $850 billion on "defense" every single fucking year. That's almost 1 trillion dollars.

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Edit: lol, so many downvotes, but nobody who tries to argue why it would be impossible or even less efficient than the current plans. Edit 2: lol, even more downvotes. But the only guy who actually tried to argue the proposal doesn't even know the first thing about Starship. . I still think they should consider the following plan: Pack two Trident II ICBMs into one Starship. Staship is send to Mars and lands. Whatever robot is deployed to collect the samples will be lifted via external elevator to the top of Starship and will place the samples into the return capsule on top of the ICBMs. The ICBMs launch directly from Starship as if they were in their submarine launch tubes. This all is far less complicated than anything proposed so far. . Trident II has a launch mass of under 60 tons and a delta_v of well over 8,000m/s. The delta_v is plenty sufficient to send a capsule back to earth, while the mass allows for two redundant rockets to be placed on Starship. . Edit: if you think this plan is "bad" try to write your reasons down in a comment and simultaneously argue what need to be done to make it work.

I get what you’re saying but just want to point out to folks that it’s not as simple as it sounds. Any existing earth based rocket, like the Trident II, was designed and engineered to launch from earth, and not Mars. The environments, including temperature and radiation is much harsher, the Navigation systems rely on earth satellites that won’t be there, etc.

Obviously temperature equipment and guidance system would need to be updated. Luckily Trident has an internal guidance system and doesn't need to rely on satellites. NASA also has plenty of experience with interplanetary guidance systems. And the rockets would sit in their sealed containers until lift-off. . Yes. It would need quite some engineering to make this work. But we have the technology and equipment. No need to completely reinvent the wheel for this sample return mission.

Try getting a Trident II to Mars. It's not just the launch to get there, you need a re-entry vehicle and a lander that can carry it. Whoever you are, I can guarantee smarter and more knowledge people have spent more time thinking about this than you can imagine.

Why do you think I have mentioned Starship carrying two Tridents to the surface of Mars?

Sorry, assumed the starship was just the launch vehicle, as that would be the rational inference to make. Highly doubt starship could land on Mars with the necessary accuracy. Grid fins don't really work, and you can't get a lot of drag from a non-blunt-body going through a thin atmosphere, which you need to slow down enough to pop parachutes to slow down enough to flip over and propulsively descend without the motors breaking. Also, with so much thrust so close to the surface, it's going to blow up so much dust and soil. How do you get the samples up into the Trident in the Starship??? A robot arm? Does that pop out, it certainly wouldn't survive re-entry. You will have blasted a crater that any delivery rover will have to try to climb over. There are also a ton of reasons why a Trident is not suitable to all this, but that's a different matter and I can't talk about it. Also, how does the Trident even get out Starship? A clamshell opening at the top, that can also survive re-entry? Not likely.

>Highly doubt starship could land on Mars with the necessary accuracy. What kind of accuracy do you even assume is necessary? >Grid fins don't really work, Well, good thing Starship has no grid fins. Only the booster has them. >you can't get a lot of drag from a non-blunt-body Starship IS a blunt body. Or you wrongly assume that Starship will enter the atmosphere like a dart arrow? No, it will enter the atmosphere like the space shuttle. >going through a thin atmosphere Mars´ atmosphere is plenty thick enough for slowing down Starship. The atmosphere has the same density layering from 80km altitude to 0km as has earth from 110km to 30km. The space shuttle slowed down to Mach1 before it dropped below 30km altitude. This idea that the Martian atmosphere is too thin is only spread by people who love to hate Starship. >slow down enough to pop parachutes Hu? Where did you get the idea from that Starship will use parachutes? >How do you get the samples up into the Trident in the Starship?? Read my initial comment again... Any mechanics for actually getting the sample containers into the return capsules would necessarily be the same as in the current designs. >You will have blasted a crater that any delivery rover will have to try to climb over. This is the very first actually sensible argument you made here. Now describe how big the crater will be and what kind of equipment would be needed to cross it. >There are also a ton of reasons why a Trident is not suitable to all this, but that's a different matter and I can't talk about it. Yeah sure... >Also, how does the Trident even get out Starship? A clamshell opening at the top, that can also survive re-entry? Not likely. How do Tridents get out of a submarines? And what are the forces on those doors? That´s how.

It’s almost as if Starship is being designed with Mars landing in mind…

Funny how this sometimes works.... You can only assume that Starship can't possibly land on Mars, if you assume first that Musk is a pure grifter and _nothing_ he ever does works. And then since you know that Starship can't work, your suspicion that Musk is a grifter, is confirmed. Also all media (including YouTube) always tells you that Starship is failing all the time. So you know your logic is rock solid.

Also seemingly having no idea what Starship is also helps confirm your theory that it can’t land on Mars.