Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “NASA calls it quits for Mars mission, seeks help from startups l TechCrunch Minute”.
Nasa wants your help bringing rocks back from Mars. It turns out that NASA’s, 11 billion 15-year mission to collect and return samples from Mars is getting scrapped. Nasa administrator Bill Nelson said, and I quote, the bottom line is an 11 billion budget is too expensive and a 2040 return date is too far away. So NASA is looking to clear all their current plans for the Mars sample return Mission and instead work with a commercial partner from the jump. That means the agency is about to solicit architecture proposals from the industry that could return samples in the 2030s at a lower cost. In short, the massive agency is looking for partners who can do more with less money and on a quicker timeline, and that means the situation could be huge for space startups, who might want to take a shot at helping NASA get to, and then back from the Red planet, with plenty of gravel in toe now the question you might be asking yourself is this: why can these newer space industry players deliver where NASA, which is quite the history, cannot? The first thing you got to keep in mind is just how heavily space startups have invested in interplanetary capabilities.
Just to pick one recent example: intuitive machines recently accomplished their first ever lunar Landing that went kind of okay, but they have plans for another and because the timeline here is so long launch. Vehicles like blue origins, new Glenn rocket Labs, Neutron and, of course, spacex’s Starship, may be cleared to fly by the time. The mission is actually ready to start Planet hopping, so the situation could be read as an admission by NASA that it is just no longer feasible to take on these massive Missions at a reasonable cost and time Horizon on its own.
But that same situation is also a huge Boon for the smaller players in the space industry like startups and primes and launch providers who may have seen the writing on the wall. The move to preemptively opt for a leaner Mars program. Fueled by commercial Ambitions doesn’t really have that many downsides, as far as I can tell, apart from, of course, sour grapes from any company that was going to get a bigger bite at the first pie, then the second, but we don’t cry for corporations. So now we get to wait and see which partner or Partners will have one of the biggest contracts we’ve ever seen in the space startup landscape to date and what impact that might have on Space investment and the nent space 3.0 industry.
I’M freaking excited I’ll, see you tomorrow. .