Experts Suggest Using SpaceX's Starship To Rescue Stranded Samples On Surface Of Mars

An independent review board  balked last year at the Mars Sample Return mission's "unrealistic" budget, highly complex mission design, and glaring management failures.

Earlier this year, budget cuts forced the agency's Jet Propulsion Lab to let go of a whopping 530 employees , with NASA leaders racing to keep the MSR mission from imploding completely.

The space agency announced this week that it would solicit proposals from the private space industry for "innovative designs" to return Martian samples collected and bagged by its Perseverance rover over the last couple of years.

"Starship has the potential to return serious tonnage from Mars within [around] five years," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk suggested in a tweet earlier this week, responding to the announcement.

"It's encouraging companies to use infrastructure built for Artemis," he told SA . "The only conclusion you can really draw from that is they're hoping Starship somehow is the solution here."

Former NASA chief scientist Jim Green, who helped establish MSR at the agency, agreed that it could make sense to "leverage assets that we didn't have" when the plan was first devised.

There are an astonishing number of moving parts when it comes to NASA's current plan to return samples from the surface of Mars, an interplanetary Rube Goldberg machine that's already required an astronomical amount of funding and years of planning.

Needless to say, a rocket that could both land and lift off from the Martian surface could help streamline the endeavor significantly.

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