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.
In April, the space agency invited industry to come up with ideas for returning Mars rocks to Earth for less than $11 billion and before 2040 the cost and schedule of NASA’s existing Mars Sample Return (MSR) plan. A NASA spokesperson told Ars that the agency received 48 responses to the call and selected seven companies to conduct more detailed studies.
Each company will receive up to $1.5 million for their 90-day studies. The five companies selected by NASA are among the agency’s list of major contractors, and their inclusion in the study contracts comes as no surprise. Two other winners are smaller businesses.
Mars Sample Return is a top priority for NASA’s Planetary Science Division. The Perseverance rover, currently on Mars, is collecting several dozen samples of rock dust, soil and Martian air into cigar-shaped titanium tubes for eventual return to Earth.
“Mars Sample Return will be one of the most complex missions NASA has undertaken, and it’s important that we do it faster, with less risk and at a lower cost,” said Bill Nelson, NASA Administrator. “I am excited to see the vision these companies, centers and partners represent as we seek new, exciting and innovative ideas to unlock the great cosmic mysteries of the red planet.”
Who’s there?
Lockheed Martin, the only company to build a spacecraft to 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.”
The two companies were partners in the development of the solid-fueled Mars Ascent Vehicle for NASA’s existing Mars Sample Return mission. The MAV is a rocket that will propel a pod containing rock samples from the surface of Mars back into space to begin the months-long journey back to Earth. The involvement of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in NASA’s Mars program, along with the scope of the study proposed in Northrop’s proposal, suggests that they will propose using existing capabilities to address the Mars Sample Return program.
Aerojet Rocketdyne, best known as a rocket propulsion supplier, will study a high-performance liquid-fueled Mars landing vehicle using what it says are “highly reliable and advanced propulsion technologies to improve program availability and schedule.”
SpaceX, a company with a long-term vision for Mars, also received NASA funding for a study contract. Her study proposal was titled “Enabling Mars Sample Return Using a 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 has previously missed schedule predictions with the starship, and landing on the red planet before the end of 2020 still seems unlikely. However, a giant rocket could enable the delivery to Mars and the eventual return of tens of tons of cargo. The successful Starship test flight this week showed that SpaceX is making progress toward that goal. Nevertheless, we still have 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 have multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA to develop Starship and the Blue Moon lander as human-rated spacecraft that will ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface as part of the Artemis program.
Two other small firms, Quantum Space and Whittinghill Aerospace, will also conduct studies for NASA.
Self-described as a space infrastructure company, Quantum was founded in 2021 by entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian, who also founded Intuitive Machines and Axiom Space. No details are known about the scope of his study, known as the “Quantum Anchor Leg Mars Sample Return Study.” Perhaps the “anchor leg” refers to the final phase of returning samples to Earth, like an anchor in a relay race.
California-based Whittinghill Aerospace has just a handful of employees. It will conduct a rapid design study for a single-stage Mars ascent vehicle, NASA said.
Absent from the list of contract winners was Boeing, which pushed for the use of NASA’s super-expensive Space Launch System to conduct a single-launch Mars Sample Return mission. Boeing, of course, builds most of the SLS rockets. Most other sample return concepts require multiple runs.
In addition to the seven industry contracts, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) will also conduct studies on how to more affordably complete the Mars Sample Return mission.
JPL is the lead center responsible for managing NASA’s existing Mars sample return concept in collaboration with the European Space Agency. But rising costs and delays prompted NASA officials to take a different approach in April.
Nicola Fox, the head of NASA’s science directorate, said in April that she hopes the “out of the box” concepts will allow the agency to get samples back to Earth in the 2030s, rather than the 2040s or later. “It’s definitely a very ambitious goal,” she said. “We’re going to have to go after some very innovative new design options, and we’re definitely going to leave no stone unturned.”
NASA will use the results of these 10 studies to develop a new approach for returning samples from Mars later this year. Most likely, the architecture that NASA ultimately chooses will combine and align various elements from industry, NASA centers, and the European Space Agency, which remains a committed Mars sample return partner with the Earth Return Orbiter.