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The NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return mission has been canceled

154 points Muhammad523 1 hour ago 100 comments

peri-cl 1 hour ago | parent

https://archive.is/YYx0d

whalesalad 1 hour ago | parent

My brother in law (JPL) was telling me about this earlier in August. Big letdown but he assured me that they'll come back to earth some day ... just gonna sit up there a long time.

peri-cl 1 hour ago | parent

This article only obliquely mentions in the last paragraphs, but there's a parallel Chinese program that recently brought back samples from the moon, and will attempt Mars sample return, launching in 2028,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-3

reaperducer 1 hour ago | parent

it's just that NASA has given up on being the one to do it first.

No need to. Mars delivers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/arts/who-owns-this-chunk-...

notabee 1 hour ago | parent

Anyone wanting to be involved in the future of scientific research should probably start learning Mandarin. We're going the way of the Soviets, where political officers will quash any science that doesn't fit their ideology. https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/trump-planning-to-ha...

Fraterkes 42 minutes ago | parent

Do we really need to frame China’s succes here in terms of American decline? Do you think everyone outside the US views the moonlanding as a black page in history?

It’s fine to talk about a “race” if jingoism is the thing that gets most people on board with funding Nasa. But we ought to know better.

anamexis 37 minutes ago | parent

> Do you think everyone outside the US views the moonlanding as a black page in history?

Former Soviet people might...

krapp 23 minutes ago | parent

The Soviets launched the first satellite, put the first animal into space, launched the first lunar probe, got the first photographs of the dark side of the moon, put the first human in space, put the first woman in space, put the first craft with more than one crew member into space, did the first spacewalk, sent the first probe to Venus, got the first pictures of another planet, and launched the first space station.

The moon landing was fine and all, a moment of global historic import (and propaganda value, with the US putting their flag on it like they owned the damned thing) but that's still just one victory in a race that was otherwise entirely dominated by the Soviets, and on balance what the Soviets did was of greater scientific merit than anything the US would achieve for years. Americans didn't even care about space until Russia flew Sputnik over their heads.

throw-the-towel 18 minutes ago | parent

As someone from the former USSR, I find that hard to imagine. Downright denial that the moon landings even happened, sure, but seeing them as a bad event? Not really likely.

anamexis 17 minutes ago | parent

Maybe not a bad event in itself, but a sign of decline to come perhaps?

dclowd9901 25 minutes ago | parent

It's hard to imagine, since the moonlandings, if America kept its pace in space exploration, how far ahead of everyone else it would be, but also how far along everyone else would be. America was the catalyst for the impossible in that era, and then we decided to abandon it for... basically nothing. Enriching corporations, I guess?

People took issue with the cost of space exploration in context of "the good the money could do here on Earth", but then when we shifted resources that way, the money did absolutely no good here on Earth.

gpt5 19 minutes ago | parent

The US is still significantly ahead of everyone else in space. It’s just that NASA has become a shadow of its past self.

Maybe it’s better this way. There is a tendency of every organization, private or public, to rot and stagnate over time. But in the private sectors they die more quickly and give way to new entrants, which would help space exploration long term.

klipt 4 minutes ago | parent

> but then when we shifted resources that way, the money did absolutely no good here on Earth.

So things like curing AIDS don't count?

lostlogin 22 minutes ago | parent

> Do we really need to frame China’s succes here in terms of American decline?

What view do you have on the trajectory of the U.S.? Is America ascending or declining?

The success China is having isn’t something that’s occurring in isolation. There is a void and they are filling it.

drstewart 6 minutes ago | parent

>What view do you have on the trajectory of the U.S.?

What view do you have of what programs have been cut from Chinese government budgets? Can you link to some of the HN discussions around them so I can also see people commenting on the internal policy decisions that the Chinese government has made available for people to openly comment on?

notahacker 4 minutes ago | parent

tbf, jingoism is literally what funded NASA.

And ironically the US very much considers itself to be in a race with China including in space, it's just run by such thundering morons that most of the moves they make advance China's interests more than theirs. Now the cancellation of Mars Sample Return isn't that big an issue in terms of strategic benefit or decline narratives, nor is it a particularly massive surprise (the program's issues are longer term than just current administration cuts). But there is a certain irony in some of the people most interested in scorekeeping with China (and for that matter Mars!) being the ones likely to ensure China pulls off the sample return first.

jfengel 4 minutes ago | parent

It's the other way around. He's framing America's decline in terms of Chinese success.

The Chinese rise is also remarkable in its own terms, but it's not the subject of discussion here. The subject here is how the US is under cutting its former preeminence in science.

gamblor956 40 minutes ago | parent

where political officers will quash any science that doesn't fit their ideology

China also does this. We just don't hear about it because they also quash the reporting.

walrus01 36 minutes ago | parent

Those responsible for reporting on the quashing of the reporting have been quashed.

drstewart 34 minutes ago | parent

At least we definitely know they shouldn't be learning German or French

amarcheschi 31 minutes ago | parent

A few hours ago I was looking for some food safety information, found a US gov website posted on reddit and

The website wasn't available anymore

drstewart 11 minutes ago | parent

Wow, what Chinese government site in Mandarin did you use instead?

Dig1t 15 minutes ago | parent

Go check out the grants which were cancelled:

https://grantwitness.org/nsf

Download the CSV and search for things like "Latinx" or "Black" or "equity" or "URM" (URM = non-white)

>CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: Gender-Inclusive Open Source through Gender-Inclusive Tools

>This work will harness foundational gender research to provide theory-based yet practical solutions, towards addressing the underrepresentation of women in OSS communities.

>The AGEP Florida Alliance Model: Improving Minority Women Success in STEM Faculty Careers

>The research team is also investigating ways that URM women in STEM build skills, knowledge and competencies to successfully enter and persist in faculty careers.

>STEM Leadership, Equity, and Advancement for Faculty

>The NSF ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers

Most of these are pure racism and absolutely deserved to be revoked.

samudrijan 12 minutes ago | parent

Interesting take…

Muhammad523 1 hour ago | parent

I think that the scientific community really doesn't care about who will bring the samples back, but simply wheter someone will do it and share them with the world

lukeify 1 hour ago | parent

The NASA/ESA MSR was of substantially higher quality, mind you. The M2020 rover specifically picked up samples of high scientific value to be returned. The Chinese return mission will only return what it finds from its direct landing site.

XorNot 55 minutes ago | parent

It's not like they're going to do it only once though, and some is a lot more then zero.

ok_dad 41 minutes ago | parent

It would be cool if NASA worked with the Chinese agency to collect those cores using their rocket, it would be a win win.

duskwuff 27 minutes ago | parent

Unfortunately, they can't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

jmclnx 1 hour ago | parent

> it's rather that NASA has (?) given up on being the one to do it first

I think the Trump admin decided since it will not make them a profit, like other scientific research already canceled, it is not worth doing.

GolfPopper 59 minutes ago | parent

"Profit" is too generous a motive. It didn't service the Big Man's ego, so it's gone. That they can do some damage by killing it just makes it sweeter. Trump is Teemu Saruman.

titzer 42 minutes ago | parent

The way things look, everyone in Trump's orbit is just grifting off the government directly or using it to their personal advantage, including his own children. He literally said "Every time my kids invest in a stock, they have inside information."

q_andrew 1 hour ago | parent

This is so disappointing. The closest thing we ever discovered to life on other planets and the US won't even put 0.5% of budget towards retrieving it.

DiggyJohnson 1 hour ago | parent

That would be a MASSIVE portion of the budget for a single discretionary item.

q_andrew 1 hour ago | parent

I guess I should clarify, I meant 0.5% to NASA in general. Right now it's 0.33%. In 2002 it was 0.72%.

TedDoesntTalk 41 minutes ago | parent

The article says $11 billion. That’s ridiculous.

9dev 34 minutes ago | parent

…ridiculously low compared to a Defense budget of $1500 billion? Agreed.

carabiner 1 hour ago | parent

We cannot cancel anything ever because each program is only 0.001% of the federal budget. To do so would be stingy.

sophacles 56 minutes ago | parent

Or we could look at the utterly stupid things, like maybe stop having a failed war in Iran, and just not pay for those? Thats a very big chunk of budget. As a bonus it would bring gas prices down, reduce future spending in VA and other combat veteran costs, and just possible help make the case for reducing the size and expense of our military (while still maintaining the 2 largest air forces in the world).

method_capital 52 minutes ago | parent

That'd be a strawman.

What makes you think the poster you responded to agrees with the Iran war expense? He simply commented on how difficult it is to cut anything from the Federal budget. He's right. Remember when all the lunatics were out keying Teslas a few short months ago?

sophacles 20 minutes ago | parent

No, its not a strawman. Cutting tiny things from the budget to save money when there are big obvious wastes right out in front is fucking stupid. Complaining about how hard it is to cut tiny things from the budget when there are giant obvious wastes out in front is equally as stupid.

If you want to seriously affect the budget, go for the things that burn large piles of money first.

drstewart 31 minutes ago | parent

Or we could reduce Medicaid fraud instead. Why are you pro fraud?

GardenLetter27 54 minutes ago | parent

And Europe is even worse, it's embarrassing.

Imnimo 1 hour ago | parent

I never really understood why you'd have Perseverance drill the cores and then just leave them on the ground for an underdefined future mission to retrieve.

q_andrew 1 hour ago | parent

Because the powers that be would have deemed a real plan as too expensive.

petcat 58 minutes ago | parent

> would have deemed a real plan as too expensive

Who are these "powers that be"? And do they have an infinite credit card? Could they really just do whatever they want and for some reason they choose not to?

q_andrew 42 minutes ago | parent

The powers that be are the US federal government. Their credit card is extremely large, but that money is going towards wars and weapons.

psadauskas 42 minutes ago | parent

Yes. They decided that it was more valuable spending a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world (and enriching weapons companies in the process) than it would be to spend a few billion advancing science.

petcat 29 minutes ago | parent

NASA's budget is $24 billion this year. That's substantially larger than even Trump asked for, which was $16 billion. For reference, the ESA, the entirety of the EU's budget for space exploration and enterprise: $8 billion.

USA has two goddamn robots on Mars. And multiple others orbiting the planet itself. And also a couple that have left our solar system.

smallerize 6 minutes ago | parent

The Trump administration wanted to cut NASA's science budget in half, so the final number ($7.25B) is about 1% less than last year's budget. https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-mars-sample-r...

giantrobot 31 minutes ago | parent

The war in Iran costs about $95m a day and is already over $43b cost to the taxpayers, just in military spending. That's nearly two NASA budgets in just over 200 days.

The "powers that be" chose to lose a completely optional and ill-conceived war on your dime. Instead of science or helping people they decided to spend money blowing up schoolgirls.

Sharlin 25 minutes ago | parent

The entity that has exclusive power over the US federal budget, and thus NASA budget, is called the US Congress. This is a standard arrangement in representative democracies.

petcat 24 minutes ago | parent

Yes, and that Congress gave them $10 billion more than they were even asking for.

smallerize 9 minutes ago | parent

NASA administrator Bill Nelson https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/nasa-says-it-needs-bet... and then, once somewhater cheaper options had been considered, Congress following Trump administration priorities. https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-mars-sample-r...

nomel 42 minutes ago | parent

Or, it's simply cheaper to send the equipment to analyze the samples in the rover, than to send the samples back.

Muhammad523 1 hour ago | parent

Perseverance, obivously, has onboard instruments to analize the samples before dumping them on the ground

smallerize 20 minutes ago | parent

No. The sample is only physically measured and then imaged. https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/jpl/the-extraord... All further analysis will happen when the sample is returned to earth.

yabones 46 minutes ago | parent

An all-in-one solution would be far too heavy. Splitting the tasks up makes a lot of sense. Having all the equipment onboard to drill cores, quickly analyze them, decide if they're worth keeping, and then putting samples in containers is enough work for one rover.

* Storing all the samples onboard means a larger and heavier rover

* Mass budget squeeze means no more helicopter

* The return requires a ground launch from mars, so no more SkyCrane delivery system

kphorn 13 minutes ago | parent

They store the empty tubes, why not the full ones? Are they collecting that much mass that it’s really impractical. Are the empty tubes nested like solo cups to save space? I understand the rationale for the sample return, but those tubes will be hard to find after years of dust storms.

kphorn 15 minutes ago | parent

Agree, the decision to drop samples on the ground doesn’t make sense to me. Store them in the rover. Much easier to find them all in one spot later.

mring33621 1 hour ago | parent

My bet is that the new Trump-flavored NASA still wants to do this, but without the Europeans.

LorenDB 1 hour ago | parent

Knowing Jared Isaacman, he won't let MSR die without a fight. It wouldn't shock me to see NASA consider Rocket Lab's MSR proposal; they had submitted a pretty affordable proposal some time ago.

wood_spirit 44 minutes ago | parent

Yes the administration warned American space companies not to attend the international space summit in France last week because it was international cooperation. NASA attended.

jumploops 1 hour ago | parent

I worked on (a very small part of) the ExoMars rover (now called the Rosalind Franklin[0]).

It was supposed to launch in 2018, then was pushed to the early 2020s on a Russian rocket. For obvious reasons, it got pushed again, now launching in 2028.

The state of the world isn't great for space exploration, but I'm hopeful this mission will be revived at some point in the future.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin_(rover)

Muhammad523 1 hour ago | parent

I'm curious to know on which part you worked on, could you tell us?

jumploops 17 minutes ago | parent

Sure! I worked on the digital logic that connects the rover to one of the scientific instruments on board, specifically the Mars Organic Molecule Analyser[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Organic_Molecule_Analyser

Teever 1 hour ago | parent

As an outsider who is very interested in space exploration I'm very flummoxed by the state of space exploration.

With the price of launches so low compared to only 20 years ago due to advancements in launch technology and the increased cadence of launches it seems like it should be easier to do these kinds of missions and that there should be more, cheaper missions that are willing to take risks because the per mission cost is so much lower.

Can you comment on why that doesn't seem to be happening? Why aren't we covering Mars in cheap rovers and satellites?

LetsGetTechnicl 48 minutes ago | parent

Probably has something to do with the recent anti-science movement that currently has our country and government in a chokehold.

nomel 48 minutes ago | parent

We've had 8 launches in the past 3 years, with only 10 in the combined 17 years before [1].

Seems that the reduced cost is being taken advantage of. And, make sure to exclude the drastic reduction in non-lunar launches in your cost comparison for lunar launches.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#2...

giantrobot 36 minutes ago | parent

Some types of launches to some classes or orbits have gotten cheaper. Not all launches to all orbits. I don't know if any commercial launch services can even do planetary transfer orbits.

In space everything is an orbital change. To change orbits you need to speed up and slow down, all of that requires fuel. Even using what are known as "low energy" trajectories that use a bunch of gravitational slingshots need velocity changes to adjust trajectories to get the right angle of approach to some large body.

Most commercial launch services focus on LEO because the secondary stages don't need to carry much fuel and their engines only need to fire reliably once to get into a stable orbit.

A planetary transfer requires multiple engine firings. That's much harder than a single reliable firing. It's not impossible but the testing and engineering is expensive.

A science mission often needs to beg, borrow, and steal to get built. There's one shot to accomplish the mission objectives. That's more expensive engineering and testing. Some mission profiles require specific planetary alignments with very narrow launch windows to boot. So there's a lot of expensive work made more expensive by a tight deadline.

The actual marginal cost of the rocket, fuel, and launch is a very small part of the mission cost. Halving the launch price doesn't necessarily affect the cost of anything else.

Starlink satellites are effectively disposable. If a Falcon 9 explodes or fails to get the second stage to orbit they're out maybe a few tens of millions of dollars. If a science mission has some mission-killing failure there's no funding for a do-over.

nancyminusone 29 minutes ago | parent

For both operating mars rovers, the launch vehicle cost was about 10% of the total. So even if the providers paid you to launch, you'll still be picking up 80% of the remainder. Cut the development cost by 10x? Still in the hundred million dollar range. So still only large goverments can afford. And none of them would approve a bunch of rovers, they'd just see a discount on the one rover they already don't want to give you - "you have one, isn't that enough? Why do you need two?"

tinfoilhatter 22 minutes ago | parent

The cost of launches has come down, but not the cost of Freemason actors and CGI.

ak6te 10 minutes ago | parent

The nature of science and exploration is that every mission is harder than the last, which is a reasonable first order proxy for expense. For NASA specifically, there has also been a large focus placed on making delivery to orbit and the moon a commercial service rather than something that NASA has to do in-house which has held us back.

And as others have said, there is really no such thing as a cheap rover. As a recent example, there was recently a push by NASA HQ to refurbish a Mars rover engineering unit (basically a one-to-one copy of the one sent to Mars, kept at JPL for use in ops planning and issue debugging) into an operational lunar rover. The estimated cost to take this existing piece of hardware and make it fully flight ready and suitable for the new mission was hundreds of millions of dollars.

fireflymetavrse 43 minutes ago | parent

Beyond earth orbit launches actually is not that low [1]. MSR has a long history of revival and cancellation.

[1] https://spacestatsonline.com/launches/beo

throw0101c 1 hour ago | parent

Howtown had a video on this a few weeks ago:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCgC1yA7_w

sertyrion 1 hour ago | parent

That article is from January 6 2026. Not sure why it is being surfaced now.

Muhammad523 38 minutes ago | parent

I read it today and found it interesting, i was unaware of the fact that the mission had been canceled

zokier 10 minutes ago | parent

It was long dead even before this final cancellation.

Aboutplants 53 minutes ago | parent

For better or worse it won’t be long until we get private exploration for minerals and water on the Moon and nearby planets, at a relatively decent scale (in comparative terms)

hackingonempty 51 minutes ago | parent

The USA can't afford to waste money shipping a bunch of rocks halfway across the Solar system just so some woke geeks can speculate if Mars in the past could have supported transgender athletes.

It would jeopardize important national security projects like the White House Ballroom, the Triumphal Arch, the Garden of Heroes and National Golf Course, and of course the Donald J. Trump Center for The Performing Arts (formerly The Memorial To That Loser That Got Assassinated.)

TedDoesntTalk 43 minutes ago | parent

Although I don’t agree with your phrasing, $11 billion to bring back some rocks when we have a $40+ trillion deficit makes no sense.

9dev 30 minutes ago | parent

Sure does. R&D investments have a massively larger RoI than military spending - and you won’t be paying off that debt by trying to be frugal. The only way is forward, and bombing schools in Iran isn’t that. It might not be Mars either, but at the very least some interesting science falls out of it, and perhaps some interesting products out of that.

Muhammad523 35 minutes ago | parent

I was reading this outraged until i realized you were being sarcastic, lol

MiloLeo 34 minutes ago | parent

After reading this comment I think it would be worth 11 billion dollars just to get you off this forum.

dpcx 10 minutes ago | parent

I think the post was missing a </sarcasm> flag.

ortusdux 50 minutes ago | parent

I think the original plan was to land another rover, which would drive to each sample. I hope future plans weight the use of helicopters for retrieval after Ingenuity's success. It looks like the sample capsules weigh less than 3oz.

zokier 7 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

infamouscow 42 minutes ago | parent

ALIENS! The alternative is just a bummer, so just let me live in delusion here, okay?

raverbashing 41 minutes ago | parent

Honestly this is not surprising, and as much as politics suck, the rocket equation sucks harder

Mars has a little bit less gravity than Earth

How big would a rocket need to be even to send a small payload (let's think 20kg/45lb) even suborbitally so that it can be caught by another spaceship

Now check how big a rocket has to be to send all of that from Earth

You'd probably have to send this on Starship. And refuel it while on orbit

trebligdivad 40 minutes ago | parent

The Japanese 'Martian Moons exploration' mission is launching to Phobos next month and doing a sample return; how hard would a martian to phobos sample moving mission be that could then be collected off Phobos sometime?

Muhammad523 33 minutes ago | parent

The James Webb Space Telescope had a $10 dollar price tag, why wasn't it considered too expensive at the time?

wmf 28 minutes ago | parent

Costs increased after it was already under construction so sunk costs kicked in. MSR was still in the planning stages when it was canceled.

ckemere 11 minutes ago | parent

Has anyone seen broader reporting on the rest of the science budget?

ckemere 6 minutes ago | parent

Any news since January???