There’s certainly nothing living on the asteroid Bennu, an airless, 1,614-ft. rubble pile orbiting the sun about 40.2 million miles from Earth. But that doesn’t mean that Bennu hasn’t all at once become one of the most biologically interesting objects in the solar system. Samples of Bennu were brought back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2023. Now, a pair of newly published papers reveal that the samples contain precursors to life that formed in a watery environment—a watery environment very similar to the one that prevailed on Earth before life emerged up to four billion years ago. One of the papers, published in the journal Nature, found traces of brine that were likely left behind when salty water that could have given rise to organic compounds evaporated. The traces are chemically similar to the makeup of Searles Lake, an ancient, dry lake bed in the Mojave Desert in California. The other paper, in the journal Nature Astronomy, was even more tantalizing, reporting the discovery of all five nucleobases that make up DNA and RNA—adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil—in the Bennu samples. The findings suggest either that the chemistry emerged de novo on both the asteroid and on Earth, or that other, similar asteroids may have brought us the raw ingredients of life when they bombarded our planet billions of years ago. “This all supports the theory that asteroids like Bennu were among the sources that delivered water and chemical building blocks for life to Earth before life started here,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, at a press conference just after both papers were released. “So this really is a groundbreaking scientific discovery.” “We now know from Bennu that the raw ingredients for life were combining in really interesting and complex ways on Bennu’s parent body,” said Tim McCoy, the curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the lead author of the Nature paper, in a statement that accompanied the release of the study. “We have discovered that next step on a pathway to life.” Bennu is both an old and a new asteroid. Like all of the millions of other objects in the asteroid belt, it formed 4.5 billion years ago when our solar system was just accreting. But its loose, rubble-rich structure suggests that it was once part of a much larger body, breaking away from it as a result of an impact with another object a few tens of millions of years ago. Bennu was attractive as a sample return target for a number of reasons. First, its close proximity to Earth made it relatively easy to reach. Its slow rotation meant that it wouldn’t have flung off the loose surface material that the spacecraft would be trying to collect. And its carbon-rich composition meant the possibility of discovering organics. After launching in 2016, OSIRIS-REx reached Bennu in 2020, gathered up 121.6 grams (4.3 oz.) of material—about the weight of a bar of soap—and carried it back to Earth, where it parachuted through the atmosphere and was collected after it landed in the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range southwest of Salt Lake City. From the desert, the samples were transferred to NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston where they are stored and studied in airtight glove boxes filled with inert nitrogen, to prevent their contamination with Earthly atmosphere or water. JSC, in turn, loaned some of the samples to the Smithsonian, where they were studied by the authors of the Nature paper under similar conditions with a scanning electron microscope, which was able to discriminate bits of asteroid less than a micron across—or one hundredth the width of a human hair. It was that analysis that revealed the chemical richness of the Bennu material. Most significantly, the researchers discovered sodium carbonate, which is often found in dry, salty lake beds on Earth. In addition, they found sodium-rich phosphates, sulfides, chlorides, and fluorides, which are also common in evaporated terrestrial lakes. Bennu’s parent body would not have been large enough to hang onto an atmosphere and thus would not have had surface lakes. But that doesn’t mean it could not have harbored bodies of water. “On this ancestral asteroid, four and a half billion years ago, there was something like a muddy surface that had pockets of fluid or veins of fluid, perhaps only a few feet wide, under the surface,” said McCoy at the press conference. “It was within those cracks that the evaporation occurred. Water was lost to the surface and these minerals were left behind.” What’s happening on Bennu is likely happening elsewhere. The largest object in the asteroid belt, the dwarf planet Ceres, is an icy body that measures 592 miles across. About 25% of its mass, NASA estimates, is made up of water. Saturn’s moon Enceladus, with a 313-mile diameter, regularly emits icy geysers, produced when oceans beneath its crust are squeezed by Saturn’s gravity. The Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, conducted chemical analyses of the plumes and detected sodium carbonate in them as well. “So we know this mineral occurs not just in the ancient history of Bennu’s parent body,” said McCoy. “The same minerals are forming today on icy moons of the outer solar system.” The findings in the Nature Astronomy paper were significant not just for the discovery of the five RNA and DNA precursors, but for the presence of abundant levels of ammonia, which is a key chemical building block for life. “The surprising thing was the high concentrations of ammonia that we found, about 230 parts per million,” said NASA’s Daniel Glavin, a co-investigator on the OSIRIS-REx team. “To put that in perspective, this is about 100 times more than the natural levels of ammonia that you find in soils on the Earth. The high levels of ammonia suggest that this stuff formed in the colder regions of the solar system, far from the sun, since ammonia is volatile. So we had to really have formed this stuff in a cold environment where the ammonia ice would have been stable.” That, in turn, suggests that the RNA and DNA cycle could be playing out on a wide range of other icy bodies far from Earth. One question left unanswered by the new studies is why life pulled up short on Bennu and its parent body—why it stopped at precursors. Was it the temperature, the absence of atmosphere, the lack of other essential chemical components? The two new papers don’t—and can’t—yet say. “We can ask ourselves: if Bennu was such a [hospitable] environment, with rich alkaline mineral [and] brine, why didn't life form on Bennu?” said NASA’s Jason Dworkin, project scientist for OSIRIS-REx. “What did Bennu not have that the Earth did have? This is a future area of study for astrobiologists to ponder.” Those future astrobiologists will get that opportunity. Just 25% of the Bennu sample was used in the current research. The remainder, like the half-century old Apollo lunar samples, will be preserved in their pristine state for further investigation. “Perhaps scientists not yet born using methods not yet invented can make discoveries we haven't imagined,” said Dworkin. “Sample return is a gift that keeps on giving.”

Nobody expected anything special when the squadron of Navy F/A-18 fighter jets headed out for routine aerial maneuvers off of the coast of Virginia Beach one day in 2013. The F/A-18s, a Naval workhorse, owned the local air space that day—but only until they didn’t. All at once, the jets’ radar picked up a cluster of half a dozen objects flying along with them, moving erratically—and entirely acrobatically. At some moments they ripped along side-to-side at speeds exceeding 350 knots—or 402 mph. Then, suddenly, they would stand utterly still in winds that themselves were moving at 150 knots (172 mph)—gusts that had the jets struggling to maintain position. Then the objects would accelerate again. They had no visible exhaust, no discernible means of propulsion, and indeed looked nothing like any aircraft in the nation’s civilian or military arsenal. Measuring five to 15 ft. across, they were a “dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere,” former Navy Lieutenant Ryan Graves, who was aloft that day, tells TIME. “We almost hit one of the objects; they came within 50 ft. of the lead aircraft, and that's really when we knew we were dealing with something a bit abnormal here. There's no aircraft in our inventory I'm aware of that has the ability to operate at very low speeds, or no speeds, and then accelerate and operate like a fighter.” That wasn’t the last time the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP)—the genteel, modern-day term for Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO)—harrassed the Navy. “We saw them in Virginia Beach between 2013 and 2015,” says Graves. “Later, when we executed training operations aboard the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla., they were either already down there or they had followed us down, because we had over a dozen incidents, two of which were recorded [by the Navy] and released by The New York Times in 2017.” Those videos, known popularly as “the Gimbal,” after the objects’ pinwheeling motion, are just part of the eyewitness visuals featured in the new PBS NOVA documentary “What Are UFOs?” premiering on PBS stations on Jan. 22. And Graves is just one of the many people who have borne witness to them who offers his accounts. The documentary traces the arc of UFOs and UAPs in American skies, from June 24, 1947, when aviator and businessman Kenneth Arnold reported the first widely publicized sightings of flying saucers, to the present, when accounts of UAPs have exploded, with 801 reported to the military since 2023 alone. Within the Pentagon’s $65 billion “black budget” of classified expenditures, an estimated $22 million has reportedly been spent on its Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which investigates UAPs. Even before that contemporary program, the U.S. military was keenly interested in the provenance of UFOs and UAPs, as the NOVA film documents. From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force ran a secret—though since declassified—program dubbed Project Blue Book, which investigated 12,618 sightings of flying objects. Of these, 701 remain unidentified. Some of the earliest reports, from 1947 to 1949, were sightings of military assets that were part of the Department of Defense’s Project Mogul, under which the Air Force lofted high altitude balloons carrying sensitive microphones designed to pick up sonic signatures of Soviet nuclear tests. The initial rumors of extraterrestrial doings at Roswell, N.M. stemmed from a local rancher collecting debris from a balloon that descended on his land. In the 21st century there is a lot more airborne traffic giving rise to a lot more potential false UAP alarms. More than 1,800 weather balloons are launched worldwide everyday, according to the NOVA documentary, and the Federal Aviation Administration reports that over one million registered drones are in private hands in the U.S. Plenty of what is reputed to be aliens likely has a perfectly banal terrestrial explanation. But sightings like the gimbal are a lot harder to explain away—a point proven by another UAP incident known colloquially as the Tic Tac. In 2004, the U.S.S. Nimitz Carrier strike group off the coast of southern California picked up repeated radar reflections of flying objects that would rapidly appear and disappear from tracking screens. During those intervals when they were visible, they would fly in a looping, diving, and skittering path, rapidly dropping from 80,000 ft. to 20,000 ft. and hovering there. Finally, Naval pilot David Fravor and others were sent aloft to investigate and found their quarry—a 45-ft. long flying machine that for all the world resembled in both color and shape a Tic Tac breath mint. “All four of us looked down and saw a Tic Tac object with a longitudinal axis pointed north-south and moving very abruptly over the water, like a ping pong ball,” said Fravor in 2023 testimony before Congress. “There were no rotors, no rotor wash, or any sign of visible control surfaces like wings. The object suddenly shifted its longitudinal axis, aligned it with my aircraft and began to climb. As we pulled nose onto the object within about a half mile of it, it rapidly accelerated and disappeared.” Video of the encounter was released by the Navy which has never offered a theory as to what it was. Like the Tic Tac and the Gimbal, the hundreds of other unexplained UAPs continue to flummox experts. Graves is now executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit that collects sightings of UAPs with an eye toward helping to shape the public conversation around unidentified objects and deconflict airspace. He does not pretend to know what the bogeys are—but he’s pretty sure what they’re not. “I don't think that we're seeing an adversary demonstrating capability beyond our state of the art during these relatively low reward, high risk operations,” he says. “To be able to take these technologies that we're not aware exist and to put them basically directly over our homeland, in a position to be captured and reverse engineered…I don't see that. I don't see that logic.” Equally unlikely is that the craft are highly classified domestic technology that much of the military has not been tipped off about. “These were airborne assets that were exhibiting capabilities beyond our state of the art,” Graves says. “And what I mean by state of the art is technology that would take greater than 10 years for the U.S. to develop, if they started now.” That leaves non-earthly origins and Graves, for one, does not speculate on that score. “I don't think we have the proper definitions to go down that road,” he says, “without having a better way of defining how we would determine whether something is truly from another star system…[whether] these objects are using magical physics that we don't understand.” The NOVA film does offer other explanations. Conspiracy debunker Mick West, author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole, theorizes that it’s not the object in the gimbal video that’s doing the moving but the camera that captured the image, creating merely the illusion of motion—though that doesn’t explain what the object, which would be stationary in this case, actually is. In another—infrared—video in which the object appears to disappear and reappear, West suggests that the camera might be capturing the image of a bird that reached thermal equilibrium with the background temperature and thus simply seemed to vanish. The filmmakers leave viewers with pretty much as many questions as they greet them with—which fairly matches the state of the UAP art. With up to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way and an estimated 200 billion galaxies in the universe, there are uncounted trillions of planets that could host a highly technological civilization. Whether one of those civilizations would send any of their flying machines to our lonely world—and why they’d bother—is impossible to say. But the sightings keep coming—even if the answers remain elusive.

A lot of hardware destined for space went to pieces this week, but to hear the rocket companies responsible for the messes tell it, little untoward happened at all. “We did it! Orbital. Great night for Team Blue,” David Limp, the CEO of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin posted on X, after the Jan. 14 maiden launch of the company’s New Glenn rocket ended with an upper stage payload successfully reaching orbit. The first stage, which was supposed to land gently on a downrange barge, however, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, meanwhile got cheeky two days later after the launch of its giant Starship rocket on Jan. 16 flipped that script. The rocket’s first stage was successfully recovered between a giant pair of chopstick-like tongs on the Texas launch pad but the second stage was lost in a massive explosion eight minutes and 27 seconds into flight. “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” the company euphemistically posted on X. It was the second part of both those X posts, however, that told the real story of the imperfect flights. “On to spring and trying again on the landing,” Limp wrote of Blue Origin’s plans for a second launch in just a few months. “Teams will continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause,” SpaceX wrote. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability.” Rocket science has always been an exceedingly iterative process, one in which a whole lot of launches have to come to ruin before the engineers get things right. During NASA’s early days, nearly half of the Atlas boosters that lofted the Mercury astronauts into space failed their test flights before they were finally rated safe to carry men. The Titan missiles that launched the two-man Gemini crews practically shook themselves to pieces in their first uncrewed flights. And as for the celebrated Saturn 5, the magnificent machine that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon? “This was a disaster,” Chris Kraft, NASA’s director of flight crew operations, told the press in 1968 after the final uncrewed flight of the Saturn 5 almost ended in a crash landing in the ocean. “I want to emphasize that. It was a disaster.” But the Atlases flew and the Titans flew and the Saturns flew, and if space history is any guide, the New Glenns and the Starships will fly too—but not without a lot of work. Of the two new rockets that had their try-outs this week, it was the New Glenn that had the most to prove. Blue Origin, founded in 2000, is the brainchild of Amazon CEO Bezos who envisions the company as a regular provider of space transport for both cargo and crew and a major player in making humanity both an on-world and off-world species, with millions of people eventually living in space. While the company has successfully launched 28 of its small New Shepard rockets on pop-gun suborbital missions—nine with passengers on board—it had never before placed any payload in orbit. That’s compared to a staggering 423 successful launches of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket and 11 of its bigger Falcon Heavy. Starship, still very much experimental, has flown seven times. New Glenn, which has been in development for a decade and was expected to have its first launch in 2020, has had nowhere near the breakneck R&D of the Falcons. But by many measures it has been worth the wait. The first stage is powered by seven methane-burning BE-4 engines—a cleaner fuel than the kerosene used in the Falcon 9. Together the engines put out 3.85 million pounds of thrust—about half of what the Saturn 5 produced, and just under the 5 million pounds of the Falcon Heavy. But New Glenn still counts as a muscle-bound missile. “A single BE-4 turbopump can fit in the backseat of a car,” wrote Limp on X. “[But] when all seven pump fuel and oxygen from the BE-4's common shaft, they produce enough horsepower to propel two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at full tilt.” This week’s failure to stick the first stage landing notwithstanding, the New Glenn is designed for reusability—with each rocket built for up to 25 flights—and is intended to carry both cargo and crew. With SpaceX already dominating the commercial launch field, Blue Origin would seem something of an afterthought—but it’s not. If the long drought between crewed launches from U.S. soil after NASA’s shuttles stood down in 2011 and before the first crewed Falcon 9 flew in 2020 proved anything, it’s that it is never a good idea for a country or an industry to be dependent on just a single launch system. “Most satellite providers want to have at least two options for dissimilar redundancy,” says Scott Pace, the director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. This is truer than it’s ever been now that NASA has gotten largely out of the launch business, ceding that work to the private sector. The closest thing the space agency has today to the Saturn 5 is the Space Launch System (SLS), the massive rocket designed to be used in the Artemis program, which aims to have American astronauts back on the moon by the end of this decade. With 8.8 million pounds of thrust, the SLS is the most powerful rocket NASA has ever launched, though it still puts out just over half as much muscle as the 16 million pounds produced by the Starship. Still, SLS is a boutique machine: It has flown just once, uncrewed, in 2022, costs over $2 billion per launch, and is not set to fly again until the crewed, circumlunar mission of Artemis II in April, 2026. “SLS operates in a hardware-poor environment,” says Pace. “You’ve only got one or two of these things. The great advantage that SpaceX has and hopefully New Glenn will have is that they operate in a hardware-rich environment. They have lots and lots of [rockets] to work with.” Starship is proving that already. SpaceX could afford its flippancy on X because the company has always operated with a fly-fast, fail-fast, fly-again metabolism. The seven Starship launches since 2023 easily beat the poky pace of the SLS, and NASA has enough faith in the rocket that it tapped the upper stage of the Starship to serve as the Human Landing System—the 21st century version of the Apollo era lunar module—for the Artemis III lunar landing mission. Much of the work the Falcon 9 does today involves carrying cargo and crew to the International Space Station. After the station is deorbited in 2030, however, the rationale for the Falcon 9 might go with it, especially if Starship is in the flight rotation by then. “There’ve been rumors that at the end of the space station program SpaceX doesn’t really intend to keep flying Falcon 9s,” says Pace. “So a high flight-rate Starship environment is what the New Glenn will be looking at.” That environment, with both Starship and New Glenn flying regularly both to Earth orbit and, eventually, to the moon and beyond, will be a good one for the commercial launch sector and the U.S. in particular—especially with other countries’ boosters not viable options for American and other western customers. “We don’t use Chinese launch vehicles,” says Pace. “Russian launch vehicles are largely gone because of sanctions.” Japan’s H3 booster and the Europeans’ Ariane 6 would, meantime, welcome U.S. business but they are not now competitive with SpaceX in terms of price and likely won’t be with New Glenn either. Even as the debris from this week’s problem-plagued launches was still hissing into the ocean, both SpaceX and Blue Origin were thus ginning up for their next flights. Space launches have always been equal parts high adventure and bruising business, and the two companies are aiming to play both bracing games.

There are a lot of variables at play in the catastrophic wildfires currently clawing through southern California: dry vegetation, lack of rain, dense housing development, errant sparks potentially from cigarette butts or campfires or power lines or even arsonists. And then of course there’s gravity. Of all of the factors involved, there may be nothing as basic or as powerful as the tendency of an object with mass to roll or slide or plunge downward under the pull of the Earth below it. In the case of the wildfires, the massive object is air—specifically cold air, swirling and flowing 1,200 meters (4,260 ft.) high in California’s Sierra Nevada and White mountains, and the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon and northern California—a whirling of atmospheric dervishes that creates the signature Santa Ana winds. The warmer, less compacted air down at sea level is no match for the colder, denser air in the high elevations and what’s at the top comes crashing down. Fire absolutely loves it when that happens. “We call those downslope winds,” says Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. “They act as water does in an obstructed stream—they pull up against topography, and as they rush over the crests and through the gaps in the topography, they accelerate down the lee slopes and form something of a waterfall—or an airfall of downslope winds.” It is those atmospheric gushers that did as much as anything else to fan the flames that have so far killed dozens, displaced tens of thousands and destroyed thousands of structures across the Los Angeles area. Last week, isolated gusts, especially in the Santa Monica Mountains, reached 100 mph. The weekend saw some easing back, but Wed. Jan. 15 and Thurs. Jan. 16 are expected to see winds back up to 65 mph. Category One hurricanes, by comparison, start out at 74 mph. There are a lot of variables at play in the catastrophic wildfires currently clawing through southern California: dry vegetation, lack of rain, dense housing development, errant sparks potentially from cigarette butts or campfires or power lines or even arsonists. And then of course there’s gravity. Of all of the factors involved, there may be nothing as basic or as powerful as the tendency of an object with mass to roll or slide or plunge downward under the pull of the Earth below it. In the case of the wildfires, the massive object is air—specifically cold air, swirling and flowing 1,200 meters (4,260 ft.) high in California’s Sierra Nevada and White mountains, and the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon and northern California—a whirling of atmospheric dervishes that creates the signature Santa Ana winds. The warmer, less compacted air down at sea level is no match for the colder, denser air in the high elevations and what’s at the top comes crashing down. Fire absolutely loves it when that happens. “We call those downslope winds,” says Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. “They act as water does in an obstructed stream—they pull up against topography, and as they rush over the crests and through the gaps in the topography, they accelerate down the lee slopes and form something of a waterfall—or an airfall of downslope winds.” It is those atmospheric gushers that did as much as anything else to fan the flames that have so far killed dozens, displaced tens of thousands and destroyed thousands of structures across the Los Angeles area. Last week, isolated gusts, especially in the Santa Monica Mountains, reached 100 mph. The weekend saw some easing back, but Wed. Jan. 15 and Thurs. Jan. 16 are expected to see winds back up to 65 mph. Category One hurricanes, by comparison, start out at 74 mph. “We are beginning to experience another Santa Ana wind event now, and there'll be another one early next week, and we may have two to three Santa Ana winds before we get the first rains,” says Gershunov. “That's what happened in 2017 and 2018, when the Thomas fire burned through most of December and the smoldering remains were put out by an atmospheric river Pacific storm that occurred on Jan. 9, 2018. But [the fire] was extreme enough over Montecito, in Santa Barbara County, that it caused debris flows from the fire scar that killed 22 people.” Containing wildfires—never mind extinguishing them—in parched and windy conditions can be monstrously difficult. Dry vegetation is rocket fuel for blazes and wind both feeds the flames and spreads the embers. “The winds are like pointing an air blower at a fireplace,” says Gershunov, “except it’s not contained and it’s on a much larger scale.” What’s more, while the ability of weather forecasters to predict a resurgence of the Santa Ana winds as they’re doing this week inspires some confidence that Los Angelenos can plan for what’s coming, the fortune telling is reliable only until it isn’t. Surface features—trees, hills, mountains, buildings—are agents of chaos, causing all manner of unpredictable turbulence when the winds touch down. And higher in the atmosphere things can be even screwier—and on a larger scale. “Last week the jet stream did this tremendous loop and retrograde up in the upper troposphere and was blowing in the opposite direction from what it normally does,” says Gershunov. “It was pointed right into the L.A. basin.” Humidity—or, specifically, the lack of it—is another problem. Hot, arid winds blowing in from the Sierra Nevadas, White Mountains, and Klamath Basin strip whatever moisture there might be in the Los Angeles air, and that further dries out leaves and underbrush and other fuel. “Single digits in terms of relative humidity are a prescription for uncontrollable wildfires if the fuels are dry,” says Gershunov. What less humid wind there is often blows in from the ocean, which unhandily pushes fires that might actually be rolling down to extinguish themselves in the water back up hill. If there’s even a faint bright spot in the current disaster, it’s that the Santa Anas have been gusting in clear blue skies, meaning no lightning to act as an additional ignition source. But even so, regardless of the cause, once a fire is lit in a tinder box environment like a windy Los Angeles, the business of extinguishing it takes a massive expenditure of public effort and treasure—all in the face of a massive loss of life and property. The current crisis will end, though for now no one can say when.

For nearly half a century, NASA has been talking an awfully good game about its much-heralded Mars Sample Return (MSR) project. As long ago as 1978, the space agency requested funding to develop a mission that would see an uncrewed spacecraft land on the Red Planet, collect and cache samples of rock and soil, and bring them back to Earth for study—all without the risk and expense of sending human crews out to do the spelunking. But tight budgets and challenging technology meant that it was not until 2009 that NASA, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), finally got the mission rolling. Even then, it would take 12 years for the first phase of MSR to at last fly. On Feb. 18, 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars and began collecting soil, rock, and atmospheric samples in 30 sterile, cigar-sized, titanium tubes. Now, four years later, the entire mission—generations in the making and billions in the funding—may be coming undone. During a Jan. 7 press conference, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson conceded that costs have exploded, deadlines have unraveled, and unless MSR receives a major rethink now, there may be neither will nor wallet to fly the long-awaited mission to collect the Mars rover’s sample tubes. “As that plan had proceeded, it continued to be delayed as to when we would get the samples back, and the cost began to accelerate to the point that earlier this past year, it was thought that it could be as much as $11 billion and you would not even get the samples back till 2040,” Nelson says. “Well, that was just simply unacceptable.” Though Nelson declared flatly that he had as a result, “pulled the plug on [the mission] as it’s currently envisioned,” things are not quite that grave. Last April, NASA went quietly seeking private partners, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, which could help provide hardware and defray costs. Whether MSR indeed reaches fruition, the project’s current woes are a cautionary tale of what happens when a mission gets too complex and too costly, with incomplete planning being done before hardware actually begins flying. MSR was by no means the only job Perseverance has had on Mars, and the rover has been an unalloyed success so far in studying soil, atmosphere, and terrain. But getting samples back to Earth was nonetheless one of its major goals. The biggest problem with MSR was always that it simply had too many moving parts. In a perfect and parsimonious world, a single two-stage spacecraft would land on Mars, scoop up soil samples in situ, and transfer them to an ascent stage which would blast off into orbit. There, the samples would be transferred again, this time to a second orbiting spacecraft, equipped with an Earth-transit module which would carry the soil and rock back home. Colloquially called a grab-and-go mission, this is the flight profile China is planning for its Tianwen-3 mission, now scheduled for launch to Mars in 2028. The downside of grab-and-go is that you get just one sample from one site, which limits the science you can do. NASA has instead sent Perseverance to multiple spots around its Jezero Crater landing zone—a site that billions of years ago was an inland sea that may have hosted life. There the rover has collected samples from different elevations with different chemical makeups and left the titanium tubes tubes scattered in its path like geological Easter eggs. “To find different samples of different layers showing different ages of material and rocks,” says Nelson, “it's going to give quite a history of what Mars was like billions of years ago, when there was water in the lake.” The problem is, bringing those samples home required multiple other spacecraft, none of which have been firmly designed or contracted yet, much less built. For starters, scattering the samples requires collecting the samples, which calls for another fetch rover, able to follow in Perseverance’s path, gather up the tubes, and then transfer them to yet a third lander capable of taking off from the surface, and transferring the tubes to a fourth orbiting transit ship, built by the ESA, that would bring the tubes home. Not only did that break the bank at $11 billion, it also broke the schedule, with the collection and return phase not happening until the mid to late 2030s. And none of that was helped by the fact that NASA saw a total $5 billion budget cut over the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, slowing R&D even further. “This thing had gotten out of control,” says Nelson. “You simply can’t do everything you want to do with less dollars.” But if MSR as originally envisioned is dead, MSR as an ultimate goal isn’t. NASA is currently seeking private company solicitations to land the fetch vehicle and ascent vehicle on Mars, taking advantage of competitive pricing that could assign the job of sending the surface hardware to Mars to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy booster, which has had a total of 11 launches, or to a Blue Origin New Glenn booster, which scrubbed a planned maiden launch on Jan. 13 due to technical issues and has not yet rescheduled its next attempt. The two rockets’ propulsive muscle would allow them to land relatively heavy collection and ascent vehicles on Mars. The other alternative involves NASA keeping more of the work in-house. Like the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, the sample collection vehicle and Mars ascent vehicle could be landed on the surface by a “sky-crane,” a rocket-powered chassis that hovers about 20 meters (66 ft.) above the Martian surface and lowers the vehicles to the ground by cable. The limited power of the sky crane would require a smaller, lighter—not to mention cheaper—collection vehicle and ascent stage and allow for a smaller, cheaper booster to get the mission started. Under either scenario, the ascent vehicle would still rely on an Earth-transit ship built by the ESA to carry the samples home. Both missions would cost somewhere between an estimated $5.8 billion and $7.7 billion. “That’s a far cry from the $11 billion,” says Nelson. Flying cheaper means flying sooner—at least a little—with Nelson projecting that the missions could begin as early as 2030 when the European return vehicle would launch, followed in 2035 by the fetch vehicle and the ascent vehicle. Politics, as ever in a federally bankrolled program, will play a role in all of this. Nelson and the outgoing NASA team have not yet discussed Mars Sample Return with Jared Isaacman, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for the next NASA administrator, much less with Trump himself. But Nelson remains hopeful. “We have not had those conversations,” he says, “but I think it’s a responsible thing to do if they want to have a Mars Sample Return [and] I can’t imagine they don’t. I don’t think they want the only sample return coming back on the Chinese spacecraft.”