NASA has just two Mars Sample Return mission lander options left NASA says it needs until 2026 before making a final decision on how the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission will work. During a briefing on January 7, the US space agency confirmed it had whittled down the options to two: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which would employ the sky crane technology - used to land the Curiosity …
"Why just Elon? Make Mars a new penal colony" ... I think that comment should have used the Joke Alert icon.
But when you see the difficulty we have to just visit the nearest planet, then it's clear that we need to discover how to visit every planet and even the nearest other solar systems. We've got plenty of time to work on this, the Sun should keep working for another 5 billion years hopefully - but eventually we might need to move to a new system ... we're lucky to have plenty of time to become our aliens.
*If* I'm reading this right from on here and other sources, the sample return mission has already ended up descoped, massively behind schedule, massively expanded in cost and reliant on the wild hope that a complex piece of equipment will still be working over a decade after the original intended return mission date for a plan that originally didn't rely on it still working? (i.e using a retrieval rover landing in 2029)
It all looks like it has moved from a real plan (in terms of schedule/cost/methods) into the realm of something that won't happen but no one is willing to admit that so they keep their planning meetings going anyway.
The departure from reality is emphasised by how the budget for this bit has ballooned vs the low cost of the mission it's meant to be piggybacking off.
... reliant on the wild hope that a complex piece of equipment will still be working over a decade after the original intended return mission date for a plan that originally didn't rely on it still working ...
To be fair, NASA has a long history of over-engineering space & planetary missions meaning that they remain operational long after their designed lifetimes. The Voyager missions are a case to point.
...It all looks like it has moved from a real plan (in terms of schedule/cost/methods) into the realm of something that won't happen but no one is willing to admit that so they keep their planning meetings going anyway...
The real problem is that instead of sticking to a simple mission plan that is highly likely to succeed, they are now making things more and more complex because (a) it looks sexy and therefore might capture the public's imagination, and (b) they vainly hope that it might save money and therefore unlock the purse strings controlled by Congress. The reality is that they are forgetting the first rule of space missions - Keep It Simple!
...attach big rocket motors to Mars and send it on a collision course with Earth. We'll have more Mars samples than we know what to do with.
Of course the rocket would have to be quite large but given his Muskness's ambitions seem to be limited only by the size of his ego there is no problem there.
And instead of or along with returning their samples from a limited set of locations return our samples from a wider range of locations and we share the data. If the US and USSR managed to work together during the cold war, surely the US and China can work together on something like this.
Why didn't they design the original mission with the sample return included? Was it a budgetary matter - NASA was only allocated enough money to do the rover/copter but not the sample return? Or they didn't want to include the capability of sample return and have it be wasted if the rover's skyhook landing had failed? Seems crazy to leave it until now and still don't even know HOW it will be returned let alone who will build it.
This architecture isn't really any simpler, only cheaper. They've made some adjustments like using a sky-crane but on the whole the goals are still the same: retrieve a large cache of sample containers and return these to Earth.
I believe this new setup won't be any cheaper in the long run, because they're bound to be slip-ups and we'll be looking at a $10+ billion budget once again.
If only the scientists could be persuaded to make due with a single container of soil. That way we could just copy the Chinese "grab-n-go" architecture and get the samples back before Musk lands on Mars. Can you imagine Musk landing on Mars and returning many kilograms of samples before MSR gets back? Just the thought makes me cringe. If he sends a Starship en route to Mars in the next couple of years the entire project will be in doubt.
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