alt Hacker NewsThe NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return mission has been canceled
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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.
The James Webb Space Telescope had a $10 dollar price tag, why wasn't it considered too expensive at the time?
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.
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.
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?
That article is from January 6 2026. Not sure why it is being surfaced now.
Howtown had a video on this a few weeks ago:
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)
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.
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
My bet is that the new Trump-flavored NASA still wants to do this, but without the Europeans.
ALIENS! The alternative is just a bummer, so just let me live in delusion here, okay?
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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.)
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.
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