Mars Return’s drama. Since I arrived in Mars in 2021, NASA’s Perseverance Rover has been depositing Roca nuclei and Marciano Regolito in hermetic tubes dispersed by the red planet for your future collection. Mars Sample Return is NASA’s mission and the European Space Agency to recover those samples (38 tubes in total) and bring them to Earth.
Last year, with a forecast of delays in sample return up to 2039 and an estimated budget of between 7,700 and 11,000 million dollars, NASA de facto canceled Mars Sample Return to control the cost overheads. The agency listened to alternative proposals and, at the beginning of 2025, delayed the decision for a year to Choose between two options: An internal architecture of the NASA JPL laboratory or a commercial ship of the private industry.
China has taken the lead. With Mars Sample Return in suspense, China has many ballots to Become the first country to bring Martian soil samples. The launch of the Chinese mission Tianwen-3 is scheduled for 2028after Tianwen-2 launches up to an asteroid near Earth this year as proof of previous technological concept.
Tianwen-3 is a simpler mission that Mars Sample Return because it would collect the samples of the landing place, instead of the carefully selected rock nuclei in different places by the Rover Perseverance. However, it has the same objectives as the NASA mission: analyze samples on Earth in search of organic substances and “biosignuras”, signs of past life.
Tianwen-3 opens to other countries. The China Space Agency (CNSA) also announced that its sampling recovery mission will be open to international cooperation. Scientists and space agencies around the world can propose until June 30 scientific experiments or instruments to include in the Chinese mission.
Tianwen-3 will carry 15 kg of foreign instruments on the ship that will return to the Earth with the samples and 5 kg of additional foreign instruments in the orbiter that will remain in Martian orbit. It could be the case that the European Space Agency, which already participated in Mars Sample Return with the return ship, made a proposal and ended up advancing NASA in this way.
Multimillionaires to the rescue. Meanwhile, in the United States, Spacex and Blue Origin have proposed NASA to take advantage of the same ships they have in development for Artemis lunar missions (Starship and Blue Moon) with the aim of recovering Mars samples.
However, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have already received numerous public contracts, and a third millionaire, Peter Beck, CEO of the Rocket Lab’s rocket company, It has a more concrete and simple proposal. A solution of 4,000 million dollars with simple technology to bring the samples in 2031, the same year as the Chinese nave Tianwen-3 would return to the earth.
Rocket Lab architecture. Three launches in total for all ships of the mission. The orbiter Mars Telecommunications Orbiter would facilitate communication between Mars and Earth. The Lander Lander Lander lands would land on the surface of Mars to collect the samples with the same supersonic aerocies and parachutes that the Martian Rovers use.
The Mars Ascent Vehicle, designed as a single rocket stage, would take off towards the Martian orbit with chemical propulsion Using Electron Rutherford engines from Rocket Lab. The Earth Return Orbiter ship would collect the samples in the Martian orbit to bring them back to the earth using similar engines.
The three goals of the space race. Decide what NASA decides, China is determined to take advantage of the delays of Mars Sample Return to get the symbolic victory of bringing the first samples of Mars, as has already happened with the Chang’e-6 mission and the first samples of the hidden face of the moon.
At the same time, there are two other goals in the space race. The United States announced to hype and saucer that would take the first woman to the moon with the Artemis III mission (planned by 2027), but its launch has been delayed and now the architecture of every Artemis program, as well as that of Mars Sampple Return, It is in question for the numerous cost overruns of the SLS rocket and Starship’s delays. China, meanwhile, plans to reach the moon in 2030. Then, both countries will try to take the first humans to Mars.
Image | POT
In Xataka | NASA had marked two major short -term objectives. China threatens to defeat her in both