NASA’s Mars Sample Return Mission Needs to Die & Go Away: Send People to Mars Instead, Obviously!

NASA needs to just cancel the Mars Sample Return (MRS) mission and focus on sending humans to Mars to do the science themselves.

The latest estimates put the cost of the MSR program way, far, extremely over-budget at at US$8–10 billion. That’s “billion” with a “b”. All just to send a few kilograms of Martian dirt back to Earth. And as that linked article points out, the whole project is way off schedule, way over budget, and likely way too complex to work successfully.

On the other hand, that same price of US$10 billion is the entire cost of developing SpaceX’s Starship. After it is developed, it could cost between US$2–10 million per launch, with a launch to Mars likely costing a bit more, but those costs are in the low million range!

Elon Musk has said that he thinks he can get one Starship launch down to costing on US$5 million! For now, though, we will 10x that estimate and suppose that the initial Starship launches to get humans to Mars will cost US$50 million each.

Let us also suppose that it will take ten Starship launches to fully refuel one human-carrying Starship to go to the Moon (a middle ground between NASA’s estimate of 20, and Musk’s estimate as low as 4). Now let us assume that a Moon-bound Starship will be just as loaded as a Mars-bound Starship.

After a fleet of around ten Starships refuel the Mars-bound Starship, another 5–10…