NASA/ESA - Mars Sample Return mission

[Robotbeat]

If one were to propose an alternative approach to MSR, there are multiple avenues to choose from:

1) Keep everything the same, but remove unnecessary extra parts like the helicopters and pare down operations.
2) same as #1 but instead of a really high cost conventional contract lander, compete the lander among newer providers, including the likes of Impulse, the various CPLS providers, etc. The ascent vehicle, the canister, the ESA portion, and the return capsule are all the same.

3) but the lander provider also makes the ascent vehicle.

4) the same but the lander provider does direct return to Earth, the only part being the same is the Earth reentry capsule. Not sure how much money there is to save here if ESA is already paying for the capture vehicle which wouldn’t be needed here. Probably cheaper if you include the ESA orbiter as part of the cost. You could do direct-ascent direct to Earth.

5) the entire mission is done by the lander provider, including Earth return reentry.


Options 1-3 seem reasonable to me.

Option 5 is potentially problematic because of the crazy high reliability requirements for the Earth return capsule. They want a basically zero chance of contaminating earth with the Mars samples, so the capsule has to be as simple as possible but simultaneously with the most mission assurance done on it than anything else in the program. I think they’re shooting for not more than a one in a million chance of exposing the Earth to the Mars samples. So that part is going to have the least design freedom for an alternative provider, and it’s not clear they’ll be able to save any money on that part.

[deltaV]

5) the entire mission is done by the lander provider, including Earth return reentry.

Option 5 is potentially problematic because of the crazy high reliability requirements for the Earth return capsule. They want a basically zero chance of contaminating earth with the Mars samples, so the capsule has to be as simple as possible but simultaneously with the most mission assurance done on it than anything else in the program. I think they’re shooting for not more than a one in a million chance of exposing the Earth to the Mars samples. So that part is going to have the least design freedom for an alternative provider, and it’s not clear they’ll be able to save any money on that part.

Starship could make it cheaper and easier to design a reliable return capsule by practically eliminating the mass constraint. For example a 1 tonne return capsule would hardly be noticed next to Starship's order 100 tonne dry mass and is probably orders of magnitude more mass budget than NASA's current plan.

Edit: yep, the samples are apparently only 500g (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA-ESA_Mars_Sample_Return) so 1 tonne gives massive margins.

[matthewkantar]

Starship does not work without propellant production on Mars. Switching to Starship is effectively giving up on the current suite of samples.

The whole idea of scattering the samples around has seemed idiotic to me from the beginning, but that is where we are. How to get them back is a Rubic’s Cube of fast, cheap, safe, and more. NASA is doing its best to solve the thing.

The last time material was retrieved by the US from the surface of celestial body was five decades ago. Nobody thought back then that a half of a century would lapse without another taste. Banking on the most ambitious plans out there is not the way to go.

[whitelancer64]

Starship does not work without propellant production on Mars. Switching to Starship is effectively giving up on the current suite of samples.

The whole idea of scattering the samples around has seemed idiotic to me from the beginning, but that is where we are. How to get them back is a Rubic’s Cube of fast, cheap, safe, and more. NASA is doing its best to solve the thing.

The last time material was retrieved by the US from the surface of celestial body was five decades ago. Nobody thought back then that a half of a century would lapse without another taste. Banking on the most ambitious plans out there is not the way to go.

The samples are not being scattered around. There is one sample cache, that is the BACKUP. The primary samples are on the Perseverance rover and will remain on the rover until the sample retrieval mission lands on Mars.

[whitelancer64]

“ Certain types of measurements... cannot be done remotely because they require sample
preparations and analytical precisions only possible in specialized laboratories.”

What “certain types” of measurements? What specifically can we expect to learn? Or is it a fishing expedition, apply Earth based instruments and big knowledge is a certainty? I imagine isotope abundances can tell a few things, but I am not sure there is any chance of ruling life or past life in or out.

Curiosity and Perseverance both have some amazing miniaturized instrumentation, but they pale in comparison to even a moderately well funded university geology laboratory, nevermind top of the line labs.

There are a wide variety of types of spectrometers that haven't yet been miniaturized and sent to Mars, there's the instruments that weigh literally tons and take up most of a room, like scanning electron microscopes and MRI machines, there are sensitive and delicate instruments which would never survive the rigors of launch and transit to Mars, there's testing with chemical reactants that can't safely be taken to Mars, that sort of thing.

[VSECOTSPE]

The problem with it is that Starship is a hugely challenging development project... NASA is betting a lot on Starship as it is. I don't think they should be considered for MSR before they have delivered an astronaut to the moon.

Historically, the best way to deal with uncertainty on challenging engineering developments is to spread your bets.  This is what the military has done with aircraft fly-offs and other development programs for decades.  NASA mimicked this a bit in its early planetary science missions by sending two spacecraft when LOM estimates remained rather unbounded for lack of engineering data.  Goldin and OMB staff brought this program risk management philosophy back to NASA in MERS (operational phase) and SLI/Alt Access (development phase).  When I moved over to NASA HQ after Columbia, as a paranoid PE, I wanted options and made multiple performers one of the cornerstones of the COTS and subsequent commercial cargo programs, where at least two alternatives/competitors were maintained during both development and operations.  It allowed the program to make a couple riskier bets, one of which paid off wildly (young SpaceX/Falcon 9) and one of which failed (Rocketplane/Kistler), in addition to a traditional bet (OSC/Antares), which has performed mostly adequately.  That model has been maintained through commercial crew and now HLS.

I would not bet the MSR program on SpaceX/Starship alone if that was the only solution coming back from industry.  But if NASA put out an RFI, made some company visits, and/or let some studies and found out that there were multiple, viable solutions out there, then it would be time to fashion a procurement strategy that selects and pursues two or more solutions through some development downselect or even into the operational phase.  That kind of program strategy traditionally has a higher chance of success at lower cost than betting everything on one solution and team that _must_ work.  Backups, alternatives, and competition have a lot of salutary effects on programs, from spreading programmatic and technical risk to keeping contractors and performers honest.  It’s not the right solution for most of what NASA space science does.  But for a program that’s more a transport capability than a boutique science mission, that’s going to cost multiple billions no matter what, and that is already blinking bright red warning signs well before PDR with a single lab performer that’s been at it for years, I’d argue that it’s way past time to explore a different program model.

For clarity’s sake, there are other elements of the COTS model (SAA vs. FAR, ownership, fixed-price vs. cost-plus, payment-on-delivery versus up-front) that might or might not apply to MSR, depending on what’s needed to get a decent suite of solutions and competitors.  Newer space companies are more comfortable with these newer ways of doing business, while traditional military contractors are not.  Much depends on what comes back from RFI responses, industry visits, and/or industry studies.

and SpaceX needs to focus on delivering the HLS. Any MSR contract would be an unnecessary distraction for them right now.

Young literally just released another independent report arguing that the JPL workforce is overtaxed and spread way too thin and NASA concurred.  And unlike a contractor, there are limits to how much workforce JPL can add, and JPL will add workforce more slowly than a contractor.  To the extent this argument applies to SpaceX, it applies doubly to JPL.

I love JPL.  I’d argue that it’s the highest performing center within NASA.  (In an alternate universe without parochial politics, I’d love to apply the FFRDC or UARC models to other NASA centers.)  But I’d also argue that certain JPL talents are wasted developing a transport capability in-house, and that JPL doesn’t have some of the other talents needed to do it effectively and efficiently.  Even prior MEP landers had a division of labor between contractor (LockMart) and FFRDC (JPL) that leveraged JPL’s Mars expertise without bogging those landers down in FFRDC builds.

Also, SpaceX won't give NASA a good price on MSR if they know NASA doesn't have any alternatives. If JPL is asking for $10 billion they might price their service at $9 billion.

Anything is possible, but that’s very unlikely in the case of SpaceX.  They underbid OSC/NG and Boeing by substantial margins on COTS/commercial cargo and CCDev/commercial crew, and they underbid Blue Origin and Dynetics on HLS by multiple billions.

Moreover, MSR would get the benefit of the billions that SpaceX investors are putting into Starship, while the JPL and other lander solutions would be starting more or less from scratch.  Like with HLS, NASA would basically be paying SpaceX to accelerate a variant of Starship and deal with NASA interfaces and requirements.  SpaceX quoted $1.9B to do that for Artemis III.  MSR would likely get a quote in that neighborhood.

HLS added a second, upgraded Starship landing for Artemis IV for $1.2B.  The ability to return multiple times may also be attractive to the planetary science community.

I don’t claim to know that Starship or any other lander solution will work for MSR in every technical detail.  For all I know, there’s some planetary protection or back-contamination issue that’s a no-go, for example.  But having dealt with ISS requirements for COTS, this looks like an even simpler and cleaner interface.  I don’t see any reason at this point not to go out with an RFI, do industry visits, and/or let contractor studies, especially given the state of MSR to date and given the potential upside.

I’d also like Orlando Figueroa to have an actual retirement.  He bought a house just blocks from me some years ago, and I’ve seen him puttering in the yard as a proper retiree only once.  It would be good to put MEP on a stable footing and not have to call back graybeards every couple years to mitigate damage.

[Robotbeat]

5) the entire mission is done by the lander provider, including Earth return reentry.

Option 5 is potentially problematic because of the crazy high reliability requirements for the Earth return capsule. They want a basically zero chance of contaminating earth with the Mars samples, so the capsule has to be as simple as possible but simultaneously with the most mission assurance done on it than anything else in the program. I think they’re shooting for not more than a one in a million chance of exposing the Earth to the Mars samples. So that part is going to have the least design freedom for an alternative provider, and it’s not clear they’ll be able to save any money on that part.

Starship could make it cheaper and easier to design a reliable return capsule by practically eliminating the mass constraint. For example a 1 tonne return capsule would hardly be noticed next to Starship's order 100 tonne dry mass and is probably orders of magnitude more mass budget than NASA's current plan.

Edit: yep, the samples are apparently only 500g (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA-ESA_Mars_Sample_Return) so 1 tonne gives massive margins.

So, there's really nothing to be gained by making a heavier capsule. They want the capsule dumb simple, no parachutes. So it's lightweight enough that the terminal velocity is easily low enough to get by without any parachute.

And anyway, my point is that the capsule will need a sort of one-off, process-heavy approach no matter who makes it.

[Robotbeat]

Starship does not work without propellant production on Mars....

Actually it does. It takes about 3.6km/s to reach LMO from the surface, Starship gets like 3.6km/s Isp, so Starship needs to land with e^1 = 2.718 times its dry mass. So if the dry mass is 100tons, it needs to land with 272 tons total, or 172t of propellant. That should definitely be doable. A full starship would have a mass of about 2050t, so at 3.7km/s, that's about 7.5km/s of delta-v to have 172t of propellant left over. The delta v to TMI from LEO is just 3.8km/s. Add a generous 1km/s for landing, and that's 4.8km/s, or about 2.7km/s left-over, meaning that not only are options 2 and 3 viable, but #4 potentially as well. (Mars escape velocity requires another like 2km/s over LMO).

Options here: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=47637.msg2500639#msg2500639

Basically, the delta-v from LEO to Mars and back to LMO or maybe escape is basically the same as what HLS will need to do for Artemis 3, just the addition of a heatshield. (And even that could potentially be avoided with more complexity and docking events.)

[matthewkantar]

There is the many months in space to deal with cryo prop storage.

[Dalhousie]

Starship does not work without propellant production on Mars....

Actually it does. It takes about 3.6km/s to reach LMO from the surface, Starship gets like 3.6km/s Isp, so Starship needs to land with e^1 = 2.718 times its dry mass. So if the dry mass is 100tons, it needs to land with 272 tons total, or 172t of propellant. That should definitely be doable. A full starship would have a mass of about 2050t, so at 3.7km/s, that's about 7.5km/s of delta-v to have 172t of propellant left over. The delta v to TMI from LEO is just 3.8km/s. Add a generous 1km/s for landing, and that's 4.8km/s, or about 2.7km/s left-over, meaning that not only are options 2 and 3 viable, but #4 potentially as well. (Mars escape velocity requires another like 2km/s over LMO).

Options here: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=47637.msg2500639#msg2500639

Basically, the delta-v from LEO to Mars and back to LMO or maybe escape is basically the same as what HLS will need to do for Artemis 3, just the addition of a heatshield. (And even that could potentially be avoided with more complexity and docking events.)

Can we please keep Starship out of posts where it is not relevant?

[deltaV]

SpaceX's Mars plans have Starship doing atmospheric reentry holding up to 100 tonnes of payload plus landing propellant. The alternative plans that Robotbeat proposed and the plans implied by my mention of Mars orbit propellant transfer would require reentry while holding a lot more propellant. This could cause a variety of problems such as the center of mass being aft of what Starship is designed for. One potential workaround would be to slow from Mars orbit using rockets rather than aerodynamically. But NASA and us shouldn't guess; they should ask SpaceX and others for bids.

Can we please keep Starship out of posts where it is not relevant?

A program that's as massively over budget as MSR is should spawn discussions of alternatives somewhere. Moving discussions of alternatives to a separate thread in this section seems reasonable to me.

Edit: I reported to mod requesting this thread split.

[Robotbeat]

Starship does not work without propellant production on Mars....

Actually it does. It takes about 3.6km/s to reach LMO from the surface, Starship gets like 3.6km/s Isp, so Starship needs to land with e^1 = 2.718 times its dry mass. So if the dry mass is 100tons, it needs to land with 272 tons total, or 172t of propellant. That should definitely be doable. A full starship would have a mass of about 2050t, so at 3.7km/s, that's about 7.5km/s of delta-v to have 172t of propellant left over. The delta v to TMI from LEO is just 3.8km/s. Add a generous 1km/s for landing, and that's 4.8km/s, or about 2.7km/s left-over, meaning that not only are options 2 and 3 viable, but #4 potentially as well. (Mars escape velocity requires another like 2km/s over LMO).

Options here: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=47637.msg2500639#msg2500639

Basically, the delta-v from LEO to Mars and back to LMO or maybe escape is basically the same as what HLS will need to do for Artemis 3, just the addition of a heatshield. (And even that could potentially be avoided with more complexity and docking events.)

Can we please keep Starship out of posts where it is not relevant?

Why is it not relevant? Starship is one of the five eligible CLPS providers for cargo to the Moon, and I think it'd be useful in the context of discussing alternative cargo landers. In the context of a program that may cost up to $10 billion whereas Starship is getting just $3 billion to do 2 landings (one uncrewed, one crewed) for Artemis 3, it certainly seems like it'd be a relevant competitor, especially as SpaceX is one of just 2 or 3 companies that have a specific interest in sending regular commercial trips to Mars (the other 2 being Relativity and Impulse, which are teaming together). SpaceX had also worked with JPL I believe to use Red Dragon for a MSR lander, but Starship is proposed to replace that capability. So I think it's perfectly relevant to that topic.

 (But I do think that topic of how to possibly control costs might now be broad enough deserve a splinter thread, as deltav suggested.)

[vjkane]

whereas Starship is getting just $3 billion to do 2 landings (one uncrewed, one crewed) for Artemis 3

There is a huge assumption that SpaceX will deliver those landings within that budget. A great many things have to go perfectly.

[daedalus1]

whereas Starship is getting just $3 billion to do 2 landings (one uncrewed, one crewed) for Artemis 3

There is a huge assumption that SpaceX will deliver those landings within that budget. A great many things have to go perfectly.

Not purely an assumption,  SpaceX has a history of delivering (later sometimes) but on budget.  How is Boeing doing with Starliner in comparison?

[DanClemmensen]

whereas Starship is getting just $3 billion to do 2 landings (one uncrewed, one crewed) for Artemis 3

There is a huge assumption that SpaceX will deliver those landings within that budget. A great many things have to go perfectly.

It's a fixed-price contract. SpaceX must deliver the services (i.e., complete the missions) or they do not get paid. This is basically the same as the Crew Dragon and Starliner contracts and completely different than SLS or Orion.

[Robotbeat]

whereas Starship is getting just $3 billion to do 2 landings (one uncrewed, one crewed) for Artemis 3

There is a huge assumption that SpaceX will deliver those landings within that budget. A great many things have to go perfectly.

Perfectly valid point. I think we need a splinter thread, tho.

[Bob Shaw]

Would SpaceX be too bothered if they had to top up NASA’s funding input? I don’t think so - the Moon was only a stepping-stone on the way to Mars and although the NASA funds were welcome SpaceX was already prepared to commit their own cash towards Mars. NASA money gave SpaceX a free supply of cash for Mars! SpaceX isn’t subject to the same financial motivations as Boeing but is more like BO with comparable long-term goals.

[DanClemmensen]

whereas Starship is getting just $3 billion to do 2 landings (one uncrewed, one crewed) for Artemis 3

There is a huge assumption that SpaceX will deliver those landings within that budget. A great many things have to go perfectly.

Perfectly valid point. I think we need a splinter thread, tho.

Sorry, but I disagree. Do you know of a mechanism SpaceX would use to get more NASA money without providing more services? SpaceX signed a fixed-price contract. If they do not deliver, they do not get paid. To get more than the $2.89B from NASA, they would have to renegotiate the contract and NASA wound have to agree to pay more. NASA has no reason to do this. SpaceX could threaten to walk away from the contract, but they have only gotten a small percentage based on milestones completed so far, and they would risk NASA trying to claw back some or all of even that money. Boeing got away with such a threat on the Starliner contract, and NASA caved in and granted them an additional $284 Million in 2019, but I doubt SpaceX would be so sleazy.

SpaceX may need to spend more than they anticipated on HLS, but that is not NASA money, that is SpaceX money. All the supposition so far is that SpaceX only charged NASA for the incremental cost of HLS (plus a profit) and not for any of the cost of the non-HLS portion of the Starship development.

[Blackstar]

Sorry, but I disagree. Do you know of a mechanism SpaceX would use to get more NASA money without providing

There are 2000 other threads on this site where you guys are already discussing Starship. Why not take it there? Must every single thread on NSF turn into a Starship thread?

[Don2]

Casey Dreier on Mars Sample Return
https://www.planetary.org/articles/whats-going-on-with-mars-sample-return