NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin Collaborate to Reduce Mars Mission Costs

The United States space agency announced its intention to collaborate with companies such as SpaceX or Blue Origin to reduce the costs of returning Martian rock samples. NASA was supposed to transfer about 30 soil sample tubes from the Mars rover 'Perseverance' to Earth by the 2030s, but due to rising costs and multiple delays in this mission, it has revised its plans and intends to assign the sample return to Elon Musk's SpaceX or Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. Bill Nelson, a NASA administrator, stated that the agency is also examining two options for a robotic landing platform on Mars to carry out the task of transferring samples to Mars orbit, where a spacecraft built by the European Space Agency will receive the samples for transfer to Earth. NASA's initial estimate for returning Martian soil samples was about $11 billion, but with the change in previous policies, the costs of this transfer will be reduced to between $6.6 and $7.7 billion. NASA has been conducting research missions on Mars since the 1960s. The United States successfully reached the atmosphere of this planet in the summer of 1965, becoming the first country in the world to do so. Currently, several NASA robotic explorers are studying the surface of the red planet to facilitate human presence there. Elon Musk has promised to send the first humans to Mars using SpaceX's Starship rocket within less than a decade. NASA unveiled new achievements of the 'Perseverance' rover; Behnam Nateghi reports that long stops on the Moon and Mars have become possible; NASA has achieved technology for producing oxygen from the atmospheres of other celestial bodies. The 'Perseverance' rover is examining an area known as 'Bacon Strip' on the red planet. The fifth commercial spaceflight of 'Blue Origin' was successfully completed, and NASA's rover landed on Mars, sending the first images from the 'Perseverance' rover.