A recent ARS Technica article, “NASA’s Mars Sample Return Has a New Price Tag—and it’s Colossal,” discusses the potential plans to retrieve rocks from the Martian surface at a total cost of $10 billion. This has the potential to crowd out other important NASA projects and may need to be reconsidered at a time of budget constraints.
NASA has been seeking innovative solutions from the private sector to lower the retrieval costs, but the mission may be on hold for some time. Getting rocks from the Moon and even an asteroid seems easy by comparison.
Maybe NASA needs to seen another private sector solution – a study of Martian rocks on the surface of Mars. It may be easier to land a laboratory and conduct long-term experiments in situ rather than attempting a journey back to Earth. It is something to consider for now and may give us quicker access to the rocks.
Of course, we can always wait until Elon Musk lands on the Red Planet and retrieves them.
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