NASA says JPL’s Mars rocks return program is too costly; leaders want ‘revised plan’

Bringing Mars rocks back to earth costs too much, said NASA’s chief administrator on Monday, April 15, adding that the financially strapped, multi-billion-dollar planned mission managed by Pasadena’s JPL will need help from government and private industry if it’s going to get off the ground – and back again — cheaper and sooner.

Such a change in course for the Mars Sample Return program will have serious implications for the sprawling science, research and technology hub that straddles the region between Pasadena and La Canada Flintridge, leaders and experts said.

“Mars Sample Return will be one of the most complex missions NASA has ever undertaken,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said Monday. “The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and a 2040 return date is too far away. Safely landing and collecting the samples, launching a rocket with the samples off another planet — which has never been done before — and safely transporting the samples more than 33 million miles back to Earth is no small task.

“We need to look outside the box to find a way ahead that is both affordable and returns samples in a reasonable timeframe.”

Rather than calling on JPL to propose a revised mission architecture, Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said NASA would solicit proposals from across the science community, both government and private industry, for a new approach to the mission, called Mars Sample Return (MSR).

“We are requesting assistance from the NASA community to work together to develop a revised plan that utilizes innovation and proven technology to lower risk, to lower cost and to lower mission complexity, so we can return these really precious samples in the 2030s,” said Fox, who joined Nelson in the announcement.

During the development of a new approach, Fox said, the agency would request only $200 million for the sample return program, well short of what the mission would need to operate as usual.

The implication for JPL is that the lab — itself part of NASA — will need to compete with other institutions for the chance to redesign its own mission. That’s because in an effort to save MSR from its own price tag, NASA is taking a major and unusual step by inviting the scientific community to bid for the opportunity to redesign the mission, a move that could yank the rug out from under JPL’s mission team.

When asked whether this change would have implications for staffing at JPL, Nelson said it was “to be determined.”

“Right now, if JPL were to come up with the answer, then I’d say JPL is going to be sitting pretty good, if they had the answer,” Nelson said. “But we’re opening this up to everyone because we want to get every new and fresh idea that we can.”

For more than a decade, one of the top priorities for the United States planetary science community has been getting rocks from Mars back to Earth.

A major part of this program has been the Sample Return mission, an ambitious operation that NASA’s Office of Inspector General called “one of the most technically complex, operationally demanding, and ambitious robotic science missions ever undertaken by NASA.”

The mission involves sending two spacecraft to Mars, collecting rock and soil samples, launching them off-planet, caching them in orbit and delivering them back to Earth – the first time a spacecraft would be launched from another planet.

The Mars Perseverance rover, which is managed by JPL, has already collected surface samples on Mars and deposited them in specialized canisters for eventual pickup and return by future missions.

Before this complicated mission can get off the ground, it will need to face a hurdle here on Earth, one that may kill MSR altogether: funding.

The MSR mission, which has been largely planned and managed out of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was previously envisioned to cost between $5 and $7 billion dollars, delivering samples to Earth sometime in the 2030s.

After being examined by multiple Independent Review Boards, a troubling finding emerged – the MSR would either cost $11 billion or would be returning samples to Earth in 2040.

For NASA administrators, as Nelson and Foxx said Monday, neither of these options are acceptable.

In a statement released after the media event, JPL expressed its commitment to the Sample Return mission.

“JPL remains strongly committed to the Mars Sample Return mission, the highest priority in the past two Planetary Science Decadal Surveys. We will continue to contribute our unique capabilities to NASA and all partners to ensure mission success,” the statement read.

A joint statement released after Nelson’s announcement, Sens. Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler, both of California, expressed support for both MSR and JPL.

“These cuts will delay the mission at a critical time, further diminish our highly-skilled workforce, and significantly undermine California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and our state’s globally-leading science and space leadership,” they said.

NASA’s immediate decision to change direction on the mission can be traced back to a decision by the United States Senate to allocate only $300 million for the mission in the fiscal year 2024 funding package, 68% lower than the $949.3 million NASA had requested. While the House of Representatives was willing to fully fund the program, NASA instructed JPL to plan for the $300 million operating budget while Congress failed to pass a spending package for four months.

“Remember, we were put in this situation because of the cutbacks by the Congress of the spending, and that’s what we are having to respond to,” Nelson said.

As a result, on Feb. 6, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab announced the sudden layoffs of 530 employees, around 8% of the lab’s staff, and 40 contractors. Nearly all of the cuts came from the Sample Return program. This news came only a month after 100 contractors had been laid off, most of whom worked on the mission.

When the appropriations bill funding the program finally passed in early March, the text included a rebuke of NASA for the staffing cuts to MSR, noting “concern that NASA’s actions have contributed to serious losses in NASA’s high-skilled workforce.” However, JPL, an Federally Funded Research and Development Center managed by Caltech, makes its own staffing decisions, independent of NASA.

This distinction did not stop representatives from sending letters to Nelson admonishing NASA for the layoffs. In late March, Butler and Padilla sent Nelson a letter urging the NASA administrator to allocate $650 million to MSR. In it, they stressed the consequences of inadequate funding.

“If forced to operate at the unnecessarily low funding level prematurely directed by NASA in its November 8 letter,” the Senators wrote, “billions of dollars in contracts supporting American businesses will be subject to cancellation, we will fail to capitalize on more than a decade of investment in assets already deployed on Mars, and hundreds of highly skilled jobs in California and elsewhere in the country will be lost.”

Rep. Judy Chu, D-Pasadena, was one of those who signed on to a letter with House colleagues.

On Monday, she said she continues to push for commitment to the mission and protecting the JPL workforce, but said she is “disappointed that after eight long months of review … NASA is only just now issuing a call for studies on the best path forward.”

“Furthermore, I am extremely concerned that NASA is proposing a funding level for MSR that will be insufficient for JPL to continue making robust progress on the mission without sacrificing its integrity,” Chu said in a statement. “It frustrates me that NASA has chosen the Planetary Science Decadal Survey’s highest-priority mission to absorb almost the entire share of funding reductions.

According to Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, which advocates on space policy, the move by NASA indicates a wariness that JPL can get the job done.

“This is much more of a Hail Mary,” Dreier said. “In a sense, it’s a lack of confidence in the institutions that were already committed to the project, hoping that there’s something obvious or straightforward that they have missed.”

Dreier said he would be  “very surprised” if NASA’s approach uncovers a new mission architecture “that is cheaper, faster, and more reliable.”

“The organizations in the United States who have successfully landed and operated on Mars told NASA  ‘it will cost this much to do Mars sample return’,” Dreier said. “And NASA is saying ‘maybe people who don’t have that experience will do it better’.”

According to Fox, solicitations for proposals are expected to be released on Tuesday with the proposals due by May 17. NASA plans to have a list of finalists by early winter, at which point they will select a partner to shape the mission’s future.

City News Service contributed to this article.

Source: Orange County Register