Space startups are licking their lips after NASA turns its $11 billion Mars mission into a free-for-all

Image credits: NASA/JPL-California Institute of Technology

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has declared that the agency’s 15-year, $11 billion mission to collect and return samples from Mars is insufficient. But this shift in strategy could be a big boon for space startups, as much of the planned funding will almost certainly go to them.

“The bottom line is that the $11 billion budget is too high and the 2040 return date is too far away,” Nelson said at a news conference. “We need to think outside the box and find ways to get samples back at an affordable price and within a reasonable amount of time.”

In other words, clear the deck and start over with a commercial provider from the get-go.

The Mars sample return mission was still in the planning stages, but an independent review of the project last year found that given budget, technology and other constraints, the mission was unlikely to be completed by 2040 and would cost anywhere from $8 billion to $8 billion. It turned out to cost $11. a billion. (And like goldfish, projects like this tend to grow to their maximum expected budgets.)

NASA has proposed a revised plan that follows the original mold, but is now challenging the space community to go further. “NASA will soon solicit proposals from industry for architectures that could return samples in the 2030s, reducing cost, risk, and mission complexity.” “

Considering how heavily both prime companies and space startups have invested in interplanetary capabilities, this announcement certainly represents a historic windfall. Companies like Intuitive Machines, riding high after achieving the first private moon landing, are almost certain to be firing on all cylinders to take on contracts that could be worth billions of dollars.

Even if NASA only wants to allocate half or even a quarter of its initial budget to commercial space company-led efforts, private industry has already shown that it can do more for less compared to traditional equipment. I am.

It is also important for launching companies. That’s because large launch vehicles like Blue Origin’s New Glenn, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, and, of course, SpaceX’s Starship, are cleared to fly once they’re ready to carry out their mission. is sufficiently far away. That was definitely the plan in the 2040 timeline as well, but the “2030s” (the conceptual new one) is much closer to the present, and today’s hamburger will be worth 10 pieces in 10 years. there is.

Between the lines, we see an admission that the missions that were planned before the current flowering of orbital and interplanetary capabilities are, quite simply, no longer viable. NASA’s troubled Space Launch System heavy rocket is perhaps the largest of such projects, but abandoning it now would mean giving up much, while commercial ambitions There appears to be no obvious downside to proactively choosing a leaner Mars program. (There is plenty of time to save and reuse the most important concepts and research already done by NASA and its partners.)

It is no mistake that many of the companies that will benefit from this decision (including not only startups and growing space companies, but also prime and launch providers) saw the writing on the wall and were looking forward to this day. do not have. But this official announcement, and the implication that it will be a new generation of space companies that will achieve ambitious goals like trips to Mars and back, should be very validating.

To be clear, the funds are not available yet. But the promise is essentially made that what would have belonged to the Mars sample return mission will be reused according to a new plan determined by the broader “NASA community.” Whatever the new plan, it will almost certainly mean relying far more on commercial services and hardware than before.

Just as commercial lunar payload services accelerated and encouraged the proliferation of vehicles, spacecraft, and landers we see today, including those by companies that didn’t exist just a few years ago. But the newly reimagined Mars Sample Return Mission may have fired the starting gun. Commercial ambitions for the Red Planet.