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SpaceX’s Starship Spacecraft on Mars
NASA’s highly aspiring Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission is on thin ice.
An independent review board balked previous year at the Mars Sample Return mission’s “impractical” budget, complicated designing of mission, and apparent management failures.
At the beginning of this year, budget cuts pressurized the agency’s Jet Propulsion Lab to fire 530 employees, with NASA chiefs competing to keep the MSR mission from imploding completely.
The space agency declared this week that it would ask proposals from the private space industry for “innovative designs” to return Martian samples observed and bagged by its Perseverance rover over the last few years.
And, as Scientific American reports, SpaceX’s mammoth Starship spacecraft may just fit the bill.
“SpaceX’s Starship Spacecraft has the ability to return major tonnage from Mars within five years,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recommended in a tweet at the beginning of this week, answering to the announcement.
Planetary Society senior space policy adviser Casey Dreier told SA that SpaceX’s starship spacecraft launch system could be the best vehicle for the job, highlighting that NASA is already preparing to utilize the rocket to get astronauts to the lunar surface for its Artemis program.
“It’s motivating companies to use infrastructure constructed for Artemis,” he told SA. “The only consequence you can actually draw from that is they’re hoping Starship somehow is the solution here.”
“You could might just roll Perseverance into Starship and fly back to Earth,” Dreier mentioned.
Former NASA head researcher Jim Green, who contributed establish MSR at the agency, admitted that it could make logic to “leverage assets that we didn’t have” when the idea was first devised.
There are surprise number of travelling parts when it comes to NASA’s present idea to return samples from the Martian surface, an interplanetary Rube Goldberg machine that’s already needed a huge amount of funding and years of planning.
Of Course, a rocket that could both land and lift off from the surface of The Red Planet could help streamline the endeavor effectively.
While nobody actually aware if Starship could ever be utilized to collect samples from the Mars — SpaceX has yet to even get it into space and back in one piece — it’s a ray of hope for an costly mission with a spectacular ability scientific payoff.
“There are features of solar system growth that can only be done through the return of samples [from Mars],” Brown University planetary researcher Jack Mustard told SA. “Having datable evidence from another planetary body to address that question would be incredible.”
