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

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)

This mission is representative of what JPL has become. Leadership there increased the cost of the program to $11B and would not bring the samples back until 2040, they also designed the mission around legacy rockets like Ariane 64 instead of working to lower costs and increase capacity by working with industry and designing around Starship or New Glenn. The moon missions brought back 842 pounds of rocks and MSL would bring back 1.1 pounds. It’s directionally better to wait for manned missions to Mars so we can bring back tons of rocks or even do the research on Mars itself. It seems like the JPL mission is maximized to provide jobs to researchers and maximized for mission complexity rather than just buying rocks from a contractor with quoted price and lead time.

I’d be interested in working there to help accelerate the program but I’m not if I would get support internally.

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

I'm personally sad to see samples from Jezero crater with potential biosignatures [1] won't find their way back to Earth for the foreseeable future. I was _really_ looking forward to learning more about what we found.

Maybe in some ideal world the US and China would work together to pass those samples on to a Chinese MSR, but it seems borderline impossible.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09413-0

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.

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?

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.

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)

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

This article is nine months old.

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

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.

Any news since January???

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this but one reason not to do this mission is that we have ~400 Martian samples from meteors found on Earth [1]. The fact that there's even 1 is kind of amazing to me. And this has been confirmed by multiple methods including analyzing the air bubbles trapped in the rock matching Mars's atmosphere.

Flying to Mars and then flying back is incredibly complicated and much more expensive. Rather than sending an exploratory rover or a satellite, you have to basically send an entire launch vehicle when we've never launched anything into orbit from Mars before. And it has to operate essentially autonomously (for the launch).

Even missions to get samples from comets and asteroids are far less complicated because you're not dropping into a gravity well with just enough atmosphere to cover all your stuff in dust but not enough for atmospheric braking. Mars has the exact wrong amount of atmosphere.

Obviously samples returned from Mars would be better but it diminishes the value when we already have samples here. So the huge price tag and incredible engineering complexity becomes harder to justify.

[1]: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/martian-meteorites-rare-visit...

don't boo, vote

I was holding my breath for Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope which amazingly wasn't cancelled but they did cancel its successor, the Habitable Worlds Observatory Space Telescope which would be able to spot earth-sized exo-planets

even though Congress already funded it, because somehow the executive is allowed to illegally pocket veto Congress over and over again past two years

it's all Heritage Foundation and Russell Vought, he has no use for science and education

Fucking retarded, just take whatever was wasted fighting a losing was for no good reason and spend it on NASA.

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

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.

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

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

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