NASA’s Mars and Moon missions are falling apart. A double defeat against China is increasingly likely

It is not unusual for China to achieve milestones in space exploration that the United States does not yet have to its credit, such as successfully landing on the far side of the Moon or bringing samples from the youngest regions of the satellite to Earth. But what happens if China hits where it hurts?

The two most important exploration missions for NASA right now are to bring to Earth the rock samples that the Perseverance rover is collecting on Mars and return to the Moon after 50 years with the first woman. As the space agency’s budget problems and its partners’ delays put these two missions in jeopardy, China is more likely to achieve both before NASA.

Mars Sample Return

Overshadowed by the fame of its small companion Ingenuity, NASA’s Perseverance rover has done a brilliant job selecting samples of Martian rocks and depositing them in tubes on the surface of Mars so that NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) can bring them back to Earth in the future Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission.

The news is that NASA has just halted MSR development in an attempt to contain its budget after a pair of expert committees concluded that the mission cannot be completed until 2040 with a budget of between $8 billion and $11 billion. , more than double what was expected.

What is MSR? The first mission to bring samples from another planet is, as expected, quite complex, and its design has been changing. It essentially consists of launching a European spacecraft, Earth Returner Orbiter (ERO), and an American spacecraft, Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL), to Mars to recover the tubes from the Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars and bring them back to Earth for analysis. .

Until a few days ago, the plan was for ERO to launch in 2030 and remain orbiting the red planet waiting for the SLR. The SLR would launch in 2035 and descend to the surface of Mars to collect up to 30 sample tubes from the Perseverance rover. The samples would be delivered by Perseverance itself, if it were still operating by then, or they would be picked up by two helicopters similar to Ingenuity, the Sample Recovery Helicopters.

A European rover called the Sample Fetch Rover (SFR) was originally going to be used to collect the samples, but NASA decided to remove it from the equation to lighten the SLR, which needs to carry its own rocket to return from the surface of Mars to its orbit with the samples. This rocket is the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), which once in orbit would deliver the samples to the European spacecraft ERO so that it could return to Earth.

NASA asks the private sector for help. With the mission in a vegetative state, NASA has opened a call for the private sector to propose ideas on how to recover at least 10 of Perseverance’s sample tubes without spending $11 billion and, above all, without having to wait until 2040. , by the time the space agency imagined it would already have astronauts on Mars.

Since the main problem of the mission is the weight of the MAV, one of the first industry players to respond was Elon Musk. “Starship has the potential to bring tons of cargo from Mars in about five years,” Musk wrote to NASA.

It would not be unreasonable to redesign the MSR mission to take advantage of the cargo capacity of the SpaceX ship. NASA is already funding Starship development through the HLS lunar program. But the Starship has more pressing challenges, which we will talk about a few lines below.

China takes the lead. One of the immediate consequences of leaving the future of the MSR mission open is that China now leads the race to bring back samples from another planet with the Tianwen-3 mission.

Tianwen-3 begins with the launch of two spacecraft to Mars in 2030. One of them descends to the planet’s surface, collects samples with a drill and takes off with a rocket to return to orbit. The other recovers the samples and brings them back to Earth.

It is a simpler mission, because it does not have the rock selection work that the Perseverance rover has done, but its advantage over the NASA and ESA MSR mission lies in its simplicity.

Artemis III

In the midst of all this mess, a rumor: NASA is studying alternatives to the Artemis III moon landing given the prospect that SpaceX’s Starship will not be ready on time. Scheduled for September 2026, Artemis III was billed as America’s return to the Moon and the first time a woman and person of color will set foot on the satellite.

What Artemis III consists of. In NASA’s third Artemis mission, four astronauts are launched to the Moon on a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and an Orion spacecraft. Once in lunar orbit, the Orion spacecraft docks with a SpaceX Starship HLS spacecraft, in which two astronauts descend to the surface of the Moon in the region of the lunar south pole.

The two NASA astronauts are on the Moon for a few days before returning to Orion. To do this, the Starship HLS starts its engines based on methane and liquid oxygen and returns to lunar orbit.

What changes does NASA propose? As development of Axiom’s extravehicular suits and SpaceX’s Starship suffer delays, NASA is looking internally for alternatives to the moon landing. Although not confirmed, the alternatives would be much less ambitious:

• One of the options is to launch Orion into low Earth orbit and dock there with a Starship, launched separately by SpaceX. During this mission, similar to Apollo 9, NASA would validate Orion and Starship’s ability to dock and transfer astronauts, as well as Starship’s ability to carry crew, even if only around Earth a few hundred meters away. kilometers of altitude
• Another option is for Artemis III to completely eliminate the Starship and become a non-landing mission in which the astronauts would dock with the Orion spacecraft to a primitive version of the Gateway lunar station, in orbit with the Moon.

It is insane to use the enormous SLS rocket, which costs billions of dollars per launch, to send an Orion spacecraft to low Earth orbit, something a Falcon 9 could do for 60 million. But the first option makes, in some ways, a lot of sense.

Artemis III was going to be done without previously testing the docking of Orion with the SpaceX ship or the transfer of astronauts in flight. The only thing planned is an uncrewed demonstration moon landing by SpaceX for 2025. A modern version of Apollo 9 would significantly reduce the risk.

China also has options on the Moon. Nobody is going to take away the title of first country on the Moon from the United States, but China still has options to place the first woman, depending on the level of maturity of SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon ships in 2030.

As with the sample recovery mission on Mars, China has a simpler alternative to return to the Moon in 2030. The first mission to the Moon of the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) consists of launching two spacecraft: an orbiter called Mengzhou (梦舟), which means ‘dream ship’, and a lander called Lanyue (揽月), which means ’embrace the Moon’.

Two Long March 10 rockets, 90 meters high, will launch the ships separately. Mengzhou will host three astronauts who will travel from Earth to lunar orbit. Lanyue will put two of them on the surface of the Moon. He will then return them to Mengzhou, which in turn will bring them back to Earth.

We are not in the 60s, but there is a new space race and everything indicates that the country that is willing to invest the most money in it will win.

In Xataka | If Starship fails, China has it in its hands to overthrow US hegemony in space