Who is the Villain in Mars Sample Return?

I bet you're wondering why I've gathered you all here.

Last month I wrote about the demise of Mars Sample Return, NASA’s most ambitious planetary science mission.

What fascinates me about sample return is that it’s a human mission in miniature. The goal is to land a large spacecraft on Mars and return its contents safely to Earth. The criterion for success is binary—either the sample gets back safely to Earth, or it doesn’t. The mission has a mix of American and European spacecraft launching over several synodic periods, interacting with equipment that has been pre-positioned on Mars years in advance. And the program as a whole consumes a substantial fraction of each agency’s exploration budget, spanning multiple election cycles.

This makes sample return a different animal from normal planetary science missions, which are set up so that there is a partial science return even if important components break, and whose costs tend to be front-loaded ahead of a single launch. For that reason, the demise of sample return may give us some clues about the political and organizational headwinds a human mission would face.

In my earlier post ,I described the various moving parts of the Mars Sample Return mission that died in 2026. Today I want to try swinging around the finger of blame, to see who it points at most comfortably. The various suspects have been assembled here in the drawing room. Let’s meet them one by one.

Donald Trump

Trump has a curious relationship with the nation’s space agency. He’s clearly interested in its achievements from a ‘national dominance’ point of view, taking obvious pleasure in NASA’s recently-completed Artemis II flight around the moon. Jared Isaacman, the agency’s new Administrator, has been sedulous about beginning every interview and public statement with praise of Trump. He’s also made getting a Moon landing in before the President’s term ends in 2029 the agency’s top priority. The flattery seems to be working. Trump keeps a model of NASA’s Mars-bound nuclear rocket on display in the Oval Office, brags about NASA, and seems happy with Isaacman.

But Trump’s proposed budgets for 2025 and 2026 both slashed funding for the science half of NASA, part of his administration’s broader jihad against Federally-funded science everywhere. Trump also set in motion personnel cuts that have cost NASA about 20% of its workforce.

Congress has pushed back against Trump’s budget cuts, keeping NASA spending fairly flat. But the political environment for science at the agency has been scarier. As the sample return mission became the most prominent and expensive line item in NASA’s science budget, there was internal concern that continuing to push for it would only start to cannibalize other programs. That zero-sum mentality removed a powerful internal constituency for the mission at NASA, and in the broader scientific community.

Bill Nelson

One problem with blaming Trump is timing. The sample return mission was already collapsing under Biden. So a more natural villain may be the man who oversaw the agency under the previous regime, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

Biden had the chance to nominate a dynamic new head of NASA. Instead he chose a fellow Senate dinosaur, 78 year old Florida Senator Bill Nelson. Nelson was a longtime space enjoyer best known for getting himself flown as congressional cargo on a 1982 Space Shuttle mission, back when NASA still indulged such stunts. At thta time, Nelson gained a reputation among the astronaut corps as a man enamored with his own reflection; his fellow crew members were warned never to get between the Congressman and a TV camera.

As NASA Administrator, Nelson treated the agency like a Cadillac Coupe de Ville on cruise control, a place where he could put his feet up and enjoy the sunset years of a long career in government. His grasp of science was minimal (at one press conference, he mortified his staff by talking about ‘the dark side of the moon’), but his love for the space program was pure. He was a man who loved a giant rocket and didn’t care who knew it.

Nelson mostly ignored the agency’s flagship science missions. His heart was with the Artemis moon program, and he spent his tenure making sure that Congressional money would continue to accumulate on NASA’s lunar bonfire, if necessary by cutting cheap and scientifically priceless missions like the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Nelson rarely mentioned Mars Sample Return until the program’s exploding budget started making headlines, at which point he called for commercial alternatives, then punted the problem to the next Administrator (and Administration). Nelson’s neglect didn’t kill the project, but it meant he missed the best chance to turn the program around.

Nelson’s biggest sin was insisting through his tenure that NASA was on track to put astronauts on Mars by the late 2030s. Anyone following the agency could see that even landing astronauts on the Moon in that time frame would be a challenge, and that Mars was unthinkable. But the timeline created an illusion of momentum and forward progress that bureaucrats at the agency found useful. Fantasy schedules are part of a culture of institutionalized mendacity at NASA that I’ve complained about before. But now that fantasy did real harm. As the earliest practical return date for Mars return moved past 2040, it raised a very reasonable question: why spend billions to return a half kilo of Martian soil in 2040 when arriving astronauts could just fill their pockets with the stuff in 2038?

Nelson’s refusal to give an honest answer— that we couldn’t possibly get astronauts to Mars before 2050 even with unlimited funding, and that at the current funding level we’re never going to Mars—painted him into a corner when it came to sample return.

NASA

Of course, NASA is a vast organization that is not just run by one man. The Administrator’s job is to fight for the agency on Capitol Hill and oversee its sprawling operations. Responsibility for individual programs rests further down, and this is where the leadership vacuum around sample return seemed most acute. No one seemed able to speak clearly for the program, or have full authority over its many constituent parts.

There were worrying signs that the institutional rot and budgetary incontinence that have plagued the human space flight side of NASA had now spread to the science side. For the second time in a decade, the agency had produced a Rube Goldberg mission architecture that seemed more about budget engineering than rocket design. And they seemed incapable of controlling either costs or schedule on a flagship mission.

The report from the second Independent Review Board was full of troubling evidence to this point. Key participants in the sample return program had never met in person, or else were working in the same physical location but reporting up different chains of command, sometimes to NASA centers on the other side of the country. Several of the people ultimately responsible for major components had no line authority over the engineers designing them. Even the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, normally a bastion of competence, had made uncharacteristically sloppy design errors with a rover’s landing legs that cost a fortune to rectify.

All this organizational Bedlam was reflected in the hardware. The part of the design that ‘breaks the chain’ between Mars and Earth by sterilizing the outside of the sample container couldn’t seem to stabilize. Initially, the Earth Return Orbiter was supposed to bake the sample container with heat. Then it was decided to sterilize the sample container with ultraviolet light. Finally the sterilization step got moved back to Mars, once again using an oven instead of lamps. Major changes like this had expensive, cascading effects across the program.

At times entire pieces of the architecture would wink in and out of existence. The fetch rover initially delegated to the Europeans turned into a pair of helicopters, then disappeared entirely. Core mission constraints (like the mass of the orbiting sample) kept changing. Conway’s Law says that every complex system reflects the organizational structure of the group that builds it, and NASA seemed determined to prove it in the most perverse way possible.

The organizational chaos was accompanied by a lot of lying. The exploding budget for the program was kept a secret until it could no longer be disguised. The official schedule was never updated, even after everyone involved knew it would be impossible to meet. The assumption was that Congress would do what it always does when the human spaceflight side of NASA steps into quicksand. There would be grumbling, hearings, and then a reluctant multi-billion dollar appropriation.

But there’s no Senator from Mars in Washington. Without the sacrosanct workforce that shields projects like SLS or Orion from outright cancellation, the program had no adequate political cover. And so Congress called NASA’s bluff.

Starship

Starship may seem like an odd choice for villain on a NASA science mission. But with initial flight tests of the rocket going well, and Elon Musk promising that enormous quantities of cargo would be landing on Mars by 2020, the tension with the sample return mission was real. Why spend billions trying to figure out how to land a minimum viable rocket on Mars in 2028, when Starship would soon be flying large payloads to that planet practically for free?

Given Musk’s apparent sincerity and limitless resources, it was taken as a given that SpaceX would eat the cost of learning how to land Starship on Mars. At that point NASA might be able to contract with the company to send its own heavy payloads there. Something similar had already happened with Artemis. After NASA blew its entire lunar budget on a rocket, leaving no money for a lander, SpaceX stepped in and offered to build the lander for a relative pittance. Now it looked like the trick might work again.

One wrinkle in using Starship for sample return was that the cached samples lay in Jezero Crater, a site of high astrobiological importance. Like all large spacecraft, Starship is impossible to sterilize and would land on Mars covered in filth. But these problems seemed like problems worth having. With Trump in office, it was possible Musk would just ignore the contamination issue outright. And even if responsible adults could keep Starship out of Jezero crater, there had to be some technical way to finesse the issue (helicopters! fetch rovers!) and get sample return to work.

The point was, a torrent of heavy cargo deliveries to Mars was coming. NASA could either get on the Starship train, or risk looking ridiculous when it spent billions of dollars to bring a volleyball full of rocks home more than decade after Starship had made two-way transit to Mars cheap and reliable.

Covid and Putin

Putin’s contribution to the sample return fiasco was derailing the timeline for the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin rover. This homeless rover had spent years looking for a rocket to launch on before entering a partnership with the Russian space agency in 2013. The Russians had rockets but no money, while the Europeans had a rover and no rocket. The ESA and Rosskosmos were on track to launch their mission in 2020, but the pandemic pushed the launch date forward into 2022. In February of that year, Russia invaded Ukraine, making it politically impossible to continue the joint effort.

The loss of Rosalind Franklin was awkward, because that mission was supposed to give ESA the practical experience it needed to design a fetch rover for Mars sample return. Now the Americans had to build the rover, and by the law of flat budgets, that meant the sample return mission would be delayed by another few years.

As for covid, it got a lot of people who really needed to be working in physical proximity accustomed to working from home. The problem was not unique to NASA. As a commenter on the NASA Space Forum observed, no major aerospace project (civilian or military) has been able to hold to its schedule and budget since the pandemic. But the situation seemed to particularly affect the design teams at JPL.

Mars

No list of potential villains for sample return can be complete without Mars. The planet is cold, distant, and annoying to explore, with just enough atmosphere to make landing a hassle, but not enough to be helpful.

Two problems in particular bedeviled the sample return mission.

Landing heavy payloads. Every American rover and lander since the 1970’s had used an aeroshell design first developed for the Viking landers. NASA qualified the design at vast expense because it needed a way to land a pair of 800 kg spacecraft on Mars. Since then, the weight limit has been pushed out to two tons (with the Perseverance rover) and could possibly be stretched to three. But that’s about the outer limit for payloads, which means that every object landed on the Martian surface has had to be lightweight and built with the precision of a Swiss watch.

What we need is a way to land dumb, heavy payloads on Mars. Then vehicles and sensors wouldn’t cost so much to develop, we could tolerate a baseline rate of failure, and instead of artisanally hand-crafting each Mars probe, we could just crank them out serially. Sample return looks a lot different if there are multiple rovers going around collecting samples, caching hundreds of sample tubes, and making it okay to lose a few of those samples in the attempt to get them home. Larger payload capacity also clears the way for landing big rockets on Mars, including ones big enough to fly directly to Earth without performing an elaborate orbital pas-à-deux with an expensive Earth return vehicle.

The Viking-era constraint exists because it is extremely expensive to test and verify a system for entry and landing on Mars. Before this year, it looked like SpaceX was about to spend its own money figuring this problem out for everyone else. The company had the experience in heat shields and supersonic retropropulsion, were determined to start landing Starships on Mars in great numbers, and were led by a Mars obsessive with limitless financial resources.

But with Starship now out of the picture for Mars, someone has to step up and figure out how to land large (> 50 metric ton) payloads on the Martian surface. Otherwise surface operations there will never get cheaper, no matter how much launch costs go down on Earth.

Precision landing. This capability to some extent complements the one above. The Martian atmosphere holds a lot of dust, which heats the air around it and introduces uncertainty in where a payload might land on any a given day. This makes typical landing ellipses tens of kilometers long, and a couple of kilometers wide. There’s no way to land something in a precise location, or next to equipment that is already in place.

If we could instead land payloads with precision, the problem of being stuck in those Viking-size aeroshells would be less acute. Individual pieces would still be limited by the constraints of an aeroshell, but there wouldn’t be such a need for fetch rovers or landers sized for a worst-case aiming error. One could even try bold things like landing a return rocket in pieces and assembling it on Mars.

The Wolf Amendment

Our final villain, the Wolf Amendment, is a piece of legislation that forbids US space agencies from working with China. Chinese nationals aren’t even allowed to tour places like Kennedy Space Center.

It’s an interesting restriction. Years of sanctions and a proxy war in Ukraine have not kept NASA from sharing a space station with the Russians, or launching cosmonauts next to astronauts from Russian launch pads. The agency even used to boast about how cooperating on the International Space Station was helping ease geopolitical tensions.

But a lot of people want there to be a space race with China, so that Congress will let space nerds cosplay the 1960s. This attitude comes complete with ludicrous visions of a Red Moon, or China somehow seizing all the lunar water before we have a chance to get to it and… do what? Drink it? Make ice sculptures? The China threat is part of a strategy to manufacture political support for an otherwise pointless manned lunar program.

This is a shame, because there are such sound reasons to work with China on Mars! Both countries have an active exploration program and need the same things—high-bandwidth communications, a way to land heavy payloads, and precision landing capability. China is working on a rudimentary sample return mission that stands a good chance of success. The US has a set of scientifically valuable samples on Mars that it can’t get home. And if the countries worked together, they could create Apollo-Soyuz style good vibes. Instead of cosplaying the 1960s, we could be cosplaying the 1970s. That has to be some kind of progress!

The Verdict

It’s entirely NASA’s fault. Congress gave the space agency billions of dollars and years to bring a sample home from Mars, and NASA flubbed it. All they had to do was fly a single Martian pebble back to the vicinity of Earth, where scientists with cyclotrons and fancy microscopes could have swarmed all over it. If those investigations had found the smallest trace of life, rivers of money would have then flowed into Sample Return II.

The NASA of the 1970s could have pulled this off! But instead, the project disappeared into the bureaucratic haze that seems to have eaten the agency from within. For all the supporting villains I listed, it’s our own space program that no longer seems up to the task of actually exploring space. For the first time, a technical challenge proved insurmountable given ample time, budget, and manpower. And the effort failed largely for organizational reasons. That seems like an ominous sign for the future.