Main Engine Cut Off - T+273: Mars Sample Return

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

NASA is heading back to the drawing board for a Mars Sample Return architecture, and is accepting proposals for mission studies by May. I talk about a few takeaways from the communication of that plan, and ponder whether or not SpaceX is going to do the damn thing.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 33 executive producers—Lee, Benjamin, Ryan, Stealth Julian, Russell, Warren, Will and Lars from Agile Space, The Astrogators at SEE, Matt, Bob, Kris, Harrison, David, Frank, Tyler, Jan, Steve, Joel, Theo and Violet, Pat, SmallSpark Space Systems, Joonas, Better Every Day Studios, Donald, Josh from Impulse Space, Fred, Pat from KC, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), and four anonymous—and 818 other supporters.TopicsNASA Sets Path to Return Mars Samples, Seeks Innovative Designs - NASARapid Mission Design Studies for Mars Sample ReturnElon Musk on X: “@NASA Starship has the potential to return serious tonnage from Mars within ~5 years”NASA’s Dragonfly Rotorcraft Mission to Saturn’s Moon Titan ConfirmedThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by SpaceXWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to the Main Engine Cutoff, I'm Anthony Colangelo, and I want to talk about NASA's Mars Sample Return mission and the announcement around it this week, where NASA's taking it back to the drawing board, really. I honestly don't know how much I have to say on this, because I'm not super in the weeds on the Mars missions of them all in the way that Jake Robbins is or Casey Dreyer is on the policy side. But, you know, this could be a five-minute show, it could be a 50-minute show, so stay tuned to see what happens.

But there were a few things in this announcement that happened this week and some of the statements around it that I found quite odd and confusing, maybe indicative of the confusion around this mission overall, and some thoughts I had about where we might go from here that have been kicking around my head. So hopefully you enjoy the wandering through this. To start with the high-level details here, Mars Sample Return has been the top priority of the decadal survey

on the planetary science side of things for many reports at this point. It is something that the scientific community at large is pretty sure will be groundbreaking science. I don't think anyone argues that in any way, but how to get it done has been a major source of discussion and work. So NASA had this mission in place. We call it a mission, but really it's a couple of really complex missions that all have to coordinate together and come together in the right way. It's not just a single mission. That's what's really weird about this architecture. And, you know, the mission itself is complex to that point. That makes it really confusing. So to this point, they've had a goal, and this has been delayed by a couple years recently, but

point, they've had a goal, and this has been delayed by a couple years recently, but as it stood, there was going to be a launch of an Earth return orbiter in 2030. That was an ESA-developed mission that would go orbit Mars and contain a NASA, you know, canister, basically, the capture containment and return system that would bring the samples back to Earth eventually. After that launched and it arrived in Mars orbit, the sample retrieval lander would fly off in 2035. That would have the Mars Ascent Vehicle on board. So that would go and pick up the samples from the surface. We'll talk about how in a second. And then eventually load them into the Mars Ascent Vehicle.

That would lift off, go rendezvous with the Earth Return Orbiter, and that would bring the samples home, finally. The Sample Retrieval Lander, that was going to originally have a little fetch rover that would go out to fetch the samples, and then they switched to the Perseverance rover that has been collecting the samples all along to deliver them directly into the Mars Ascent Vehicle. And then, strangely, what was this, a year or two ago? Maybe a little bit more than a year ago, I don't remember exactly when this was,

but all of a sudden, after the success of Ingenuity on Mars, there were two helicopters added to the sample retrieval lander that were going to be the backup and the backup's backup. Why there was two, I don't know. Why there was a backup to the backup, it's a good question. Why was this getting added so late in the game uh everyone was obviously excited about ingenuity and it was working really well so not a bad idea but I think the the addition of that so late in the game started

giving people the spidey sense that like something weird is going on here and you know this mission just seemed to be from all aspects, complexity from budget, timeline, everything, just exploding in all those directions. So then there was some, you know, I think Eric Berger was the first to have a report out that, hey, it looks like this assessment of the total budget of Mars Emperor Turn is going to be pushing $11 billion. Eventually, the report did come out, I think it had at $8 to $11 billion. And, uh, the timeline was looking to be, you know, much longer than previously anticipated. Uh, so that all led to a budget issue on, on a large front. And, uh, then, you know, the budget caps that were imposed this year from Congress here in the U S The March stamp return budget line for fiscal year

2024 that we're in right now was dropped to between three and $900 million. There were a round of JPL layoffs that happened around that time. And then strangely, the weirdest thing is for the fiscal year 2025 budget request, the one that just came out a couple of weeks ago, March stamp return had a TBD line in there, to be determined, which Casey Dreyer of the Planetary Society had looked and never found that in any other budget. So it's pretty unprecedented. But clearly it was leaning in to say, you know, we're reworking things right now. We're rethinking about where this is at and where we should go. And so that leads us to what happened this week. So there was this

press conference with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and the head of the Science Mission Directorate, Nikki Fox, talking about where they're going to go with Mars Emperor Turn, and it's back to the drawing board. They're going to spend $300-some million this year on Mars Emperor Turn, and the budget request for next year is going to land at about $200 million. They do not want this to cannibalize other missions that are ongoing. There's a lot of return and the budget request for next year is going to land at about 200 million dollars they do not want this to cannibalize other missions that are ongoing uh there's a lot of science missions that are in similar budget growth phases right now right i mean dragonfly the mission i'm very excited about and everyone is like very excited about which i think is part of the problem

here which is a quad or is it an octocopterter? How many blades are on that thing? Quadcopter that's going out to Titan, the moon of Saturn, would be a really amazing mission, but has been delayed a couple years at this point, and its cost has exploded as well, up to, now that it's been confirmed, $3.35 billion. It was supposed to have a cost cap of a billion dollars. They explained that by yada yada COVID, yada yada inflation, inflation, yada, yada, budgets, you know? Okay. There's some big questions that I think should be asked around that. But Mars Emperor Turn with a growth from, you know, one estimate was like, this should cost five to $7 billion is the thing that Bill Nelson keeps repeating. But it's landing between eight and 11. That's a lot of billions. So clearly it was going to have impacts down the line when you're looking at the size of the mission and how it's going to land on the calendar here.

They are putting out a call for proposals for mission studies. These proposals are due on May 17th. NASA will select a couple of them to give awards out to actually do these mission studies. About $1.5 million each is the top line for each award. And the final report of those will be due in October, at which point NASA can take all that in and develop a new mission plan. Maybe people come up with a good proposal to drop the budget or the timeline of a certain piece down by quite a bit or rethink the way that some of these missions go together

to do more at once or to do them in a more straightforward way than a very complex three-mission coordination that is supposed to happen right now. There's very open-ended constraints on this. They have even dropped the constraints to say, you know, you don't have to propose something that will bring every single sample back, but the lower limit is 10. You need to bring at least 10 samples back. The ones on Perseverance are more valuable than the ones that they've left on a sample cache on the surface. But they're really trying not to put a lot of restrictions around what can or cannot be studied. There's really two requirements. There's adhere to planetary protection requirements

to prevent contamination of Earth by Martian samples. And the other is return at least 10 samples collected. So those are like the two requirements of these mission proposals. Now, how this will shake out is going to be interesting. What they actually get is this people proposing wholly new end-to-end missions. Is it someone that's got an idea

for a better retrieval and return or a better retrieval and handoff to an Earth return orbiter, or a better Earth return orbiter, or a system that lands and retrieves samples and sends them back to Earth orbit doesn't meet up in Mars orbit to limit that complexity. Obviously, there's a huge thing that I want to talk about, which is the starship of it all, and that's the SpaceX proposal that will surely come in. If they're not in, well, I'll save the SpaceX thoughts for the second part of the show because I have a lot that I want to go on there. But one part I want to mention that I found just really weird listening to the Bill Nelson led press conference earlier this week was some

confused statements that felt like they were going on there. They start off with saying $11 billion is too much in 2040, which was the estimate for when these samples would be home. 2040 is too far away. Which right there, as they keep talking then, led to a lot of weird contradictions, right? $11 billion is too expensive. But also $11 billion, this is all kind of paraphrasing Bill Nelson, that only became an issue because of the budget crunch we're in right now because of Congress. If they didn't impose these spending caps, we would, I guess, be okay spending $11 billion? Like, that was the weird part there. We would have been fine spending this if it wouldn't cannibalize other missions. So if they would keep raising our budget, $11 billion would be fine because all the

other missions would go on just fine. That's odd. 2040 is too long. So here we are at 2024 2024 and we're going back to the drawing board for a completely new rethinking of the mission that is going to involve development, actually building these things, launching them to Mars, and then trying to get the samples back by like 2037. Like what's the, it's, we're at a part right now where, yes, it's only 2024, but because of the lifespan of these things, you're kind of hitting up against some hard bars there in your schedule. If you're going back to the drawing board and already are going to request 200 million

for next year, which means you're a year, two years away from actually getting a budget for the real mission. So your fiscal year 2026 is when you would start to get real budget for this mission. So then you're only working on, you know a 10-year timeline to have something on the surface getting samples and sending it back to earth to actually beat 2040 that was odd um and then there was talks about you know we need to come up with new ways of doing these missions we need to save money we need to save time we need new thinking around this stuff but also we want tried and true technologies something that isn't going to be pushing the barriers too much. We need stuff that has worked before, that has done

these kinds of things. I'm like, we've never launched stuff off the surface of Mars. We've never landed things bigger than the Perseverance rover. So there are all these little contradictions in the way that this was communicated that I think just points to the confusion that is there around this mission right now. You know, is this something that can be done for a very, you know, inexpensive budget? Is it something that can be done in a not complex way? Or is this the nature of this mission? The reason that it has been such a, you know, stretch goal for the space program overall is because it is really hard to do. And it does cost a lot of money because there are so many things that need to be coordinated here. And so listing them all in a row like that, just these weird contradictions, right? And the one that made

me the most mad was probably the money side of things, that $11 billion is too expensive, but it would have been fine if Congress didn't put cost caps in. We would have been fine spending it if we could also spend money everywhere else. It's like you're not actually saying that $11 billion is too expensive on its own. You're saying it's too expensive in relation to all these things. So you're passing the blame to not being able to spend money everywhere else, and you're not taking the blame on, yeah, maybe this thing did explode budgetarily, and we needed to figure out how to rein that in more. It's just odd to talk to both ends there, which is Bill Nelson's job. I understand that. Um, but it just, the contradictions are a little much to me. Now I said, I want to talk

about the SpaceX of it all. And I really, really do. But before I do that, I want to say thank you to everyone who supports Managing Cutoff over at managingcutoff.com slash support. There are 851 of you supporting the show every single month over there, including 33 executive producers who made who supports Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com support. There are 851 of you supporting the show every single month over there, including 33 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thanks to Lee, Benjamin, Ryan, Stealth Julian, Russell, Warren, Will and Lars from Agile Space, The Astrogators at SCE, Matt, Bob, Chris, Harrison, David, Frank, Tyler, Jan, Steve, Joel, Theo and Violet, Pat, SmallSpark Space Systems, Eunice, Better Everyday Studios, Donald, Josh from Impulse Space, Fred, Pat from KC, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut,

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all right so the spacex of it all right obviously when this kind of story goes out if you are to log on to most of the internet whether that's reddit twitter whatever social media thing of choice i haven't been on threads i assume there's some people on threads doing this too but pretty quickly uh you get to like the how about just starship question which to me i'm like how about just starship let's talk about that for a second um one of the key things about really the issue that this mission is in is that the mars ascent vehicle is really freaking big it is like i think vehicle itself, it's a two-stage solid rocket booster as designed right now. I think it's like twice the mass of Perseverance, which is already the heaviest thing we've landed on Mars. We've never landed anything that size on the

surface of Mars before. And that's sort of the issue, right? Is that you had to have these two different spacecraft because the one to just get it from the surface to Mars orbit is already really big. So, you know, why can't you just get this from the surface of Mars direct back to Earth? Or why can't you bundle these systems together in a different way? It's because the mass limitations we're up against about the way that we land things on Mars right now is pretty strict.

So these were broken up into different missions to, you know know make it easier to land and actually operate and i'm probably missing some details and i will get yelled at by jake robbins over on off nominal later but that's okay so yes the the future where a starship lands somebody walks off of starship picks up the sample with their hand gets back into starship and flies home is wonderful to think about will that happen by 2040 no um. Not in my eyes. Not in anyone's eyes, I don't think. But the direction of Starship, right? More mass on the surface of Mars, more mass everywhere. Something we've talked about with K2 space, right? That the mass constraints that we're under right

now in the current space program drive a lot of the costs and complexity of missions because you need to save mass everywhere. You've got a strict budget you're up against. Well, if we're getting out of that world and mass is no longer the driver, then that does make a lot of things cheaper and easier and there's more wiggle room to pull off complex missions. So whether or not Starship is the thing that lands on the surface of Mars and grabs samples itself and brings it all the way home, merely as a way to land a bunch of stuff on Mars that make the rest of it easier. That's the thing, right? That is the thing, whether it is Starship itself or not, we need like a gigantic mass landing device to make the rest of this really easy. And I think you could probably do some trades about when you look at like a

development program for developing a thing that can land a massive amount of cargo on the surface of Mars, how much would that program cost versus how much does the program cost to develop three really complex missions that fit into tiny packages that can be delivered with our current technologies? That's an interesting math problem to do. But on the SpaceX side, this is a moment for them, right? They've had all these moments over the years. They've been the first to launch humans back to space from the US of A here. They've landed the first orbital booster. They're trying to be the first to have a fully reusable launch system. But this is a real moment right now. This is the flagship mission of the NASA Science Mission Directorate saying,

we need to rethink what we're doing here. And the thing that SpaceX is working on is exactly a solution to this, which is they need more mass, really, to make this possible in a way that is more budget-friendly. So I'm really curious to see what SpaceX throws in. They're obviously going to throw a proposal in. If they're not, something is majorly wrong at SpaceX. If there's not a proposal on NASA's desk on May 17th

that says space exploration technology is on it, something has gone massively wrong over there. For as much shit as Blue Origin gets for being 24 years old right now and never making orbit, I kind of think at this point, SpaceX being 22 years old and never and never making orbit. I kind of think at this point, SpaceX being 22 years old and never throwing a thing at Mars, be it a satellite, be it a Falcon Heavy mission, be it a Starship for the optimistic schedules that were talked about in the early

days of the Starship presentations. They've never thrown a thing at Mars. I find that really interesting, right? Red Dragon was there for a bit, got canceled. Just a couple years short of when they said it would be going. So not only do they think they need to propose something, I think whether they win this study or not, and whether they actually get incorporated into the Mars Sample Return architecture or not, I think they need to fly something on this schedule that they put on the desk in May.

With where they're at on Starship right now, with the buy-in that they have on Starship from NASA on the Artemis side of things, I really do think they need to fly something on whatever schedule they put on the desk next month. It's funny too, right? Because I think from certain people's perspective, Starship landing on Mars is just like forever far away and completely ridiculous. And yet at the same time, what NASA has signed up to land humans on a starship on the moon in the next handful of years, NASA by signing onto that has basically said all this other stuff that makes starship going to Mars feasible is technically feasible and is going to happen on a pretty reasonable timeline

to make our mission happen, which is landing astronauts on the surface of the moon. So there's this duality, I think, that we need to contend with that, you know, NASA signed on to this one thing on Starship, which is putting humans on it and landing them on the moon. But that's the tip of the iceberg on everything else that Starship needs to do to get to that point, right? All this orbital refilling, this propellant depot stuff, that all requires Starship flying very frequently, flying reusably, flying a lot. And all of those things are the enablers for them landing this thing on Mars. So I'm just really curious what kind of proposals NASA gets. They're going to get a bunch that are

rethinking in the very traditional way of missions that have landed on Mars before. rethinking in the very traditional way of missions that have landed on Mars before. But I do think they need to at least get a couple of proposals on, hey, what if we landed a huge amount of cargo on the surface of Mars and then figure out what to do with it from that point forward? I do feel like that needs to be part of this as well, or else it is going to remain a mission that I'm not sure will be able to cost less than 11 billion dollars and will be able to get here sooner than 2040 um i really you know to my again i'm not a scientist i'm not someone who's all in the mars architecture like jake but when i look at the calendar that we're looking at here 16 years basically to get something back um is there a way

to do it that isn't a large amount of cargo on the surface of Mars? I don't know. I don't really think so. Is there a way to do it for less than $11 billion? I kind of don't even think so. Honestly, there's a lot of complexity in this mission. It's a really weird system overall that we need to do because we have these very specifically scientifically selected samples that need to be, that are already cached somewhere and are on a rover. One part I didn't mention about this was the Perseverance rover is need to be that are already cached somewhere and are on a rover uh the one part i didn't mention about this was perseverance rover is going to be after 2028 ending its exploration and it'll be working its way back to jezero crater to wait for the upgraded mars sample return lander um it's just a really weird spot that this mission is in right now uh and i think this is an

interestingly dynamic couple of months that we're about to watch as nasa takes this big flagship mission and tries to match up some new mission proposals that they're going to get and come up with an architecture that is fundamentally different than this thing that was breaking um and at the same time i do feel like this is a put your money where your mouth is for SpaceX. I think even more so than winning the Artemis lander was, you know, that that's a thing that the Artemis program generally is a thing that because of the, you know, really, honestly, the budgetary scale of that is maybe not fully one zero different than the Mars Amplifier Turn program, but it's pretty close. Everything there feels like a stretch to some extent, that we're going to have lunar suits ready in time, that we're going to have landers ready in time, that Orion and SLS are going to be honestly ready in time. Everything there feels like a stretch already. All of the landers were sort of clean sheet designs, right? There's

wholly new stuff going on there. It's not like we're working from a base, a technological base of things that have been landing humans on the moon for a bunch of years in the same way that the Mars sample return were competing with a string of really successful Mars landings over the years.

So I do feel like this is maybe even more of a put your money where your mouth is moment for SpaceX to say, you know, can you actually pull off landing that amount of cargo in five years? Because Elon's out here tweeting at NASA directly, which is always his favorite thing to do, that Starship can return an enormous amount of cargo within five years from Mars. So, you know, in the way that he's tweeted at people before, do it. Do that thing. Whether or not you get picked for Mars Sampler Turn, do that thing. Because that,

if you're able to do that as part of Mars Emperor Turn, you know, that's like the hugest achievement you could possibly want. If you're able to do that alongside a Mars Emperor Turn, and your bet is you'll be able to do it sooner than they'll be able to do it, then that will be a real moment to witness. So, you know, as much as they are working on Artemis program, again, it's all sort of interrelated. Everything they need to do for landing humans on the moon enables landing a cargo starship on Mars. So I think this is a do it moment for them, one way or another. And I really am curious to see what they put on the desk next month and one way or another. And I really am curious to see what they put on the desk next month and, uh, what everyone else does as well. I'm, I'm, it's exciting because it is weird. Uh, it's not a competed mission process. It's not like, you know, the new, new frontiers missions going against

each other to see which would be more interesting scientifically and feasibility wise. It's, uh, and it's very unconstrained, you know, it's very wide open. So we're going to get some weird ideas. We're going to get some very boring ideas. Some amalgamation of that will become the new Mars sample return process. And, you know, hopefully all goes well from that point forward, but I'm sure there'll be some more twists

and turns along the way. So I don't really know where I ended up on this one, but some things that Bill Nelson said have been bugging me and some things that SpaceX should be doing in the next five or 10 years have been bugging me. So let's see. Let's see how this all shakes out. But anyway, that's what I've got for you this week. I very much enjoy that you enjoy this show and that you support over at managegutoff.com slash support. If you've got any questions or thoughts, which I'm sure there will be a lot

of coming out of this, hit me up on Twitter at wehavemiko, on Mastodon at miko at spacey.space, or on email anthony at managingcutoff.com. And until next time, I'll talk to you soon. © transcript Emily Beynon