To put it plainly: Holy crap.<\/p>\n
Sure, those specks are not definitive proof of alien life. But they are the best hint yet that life may not be a one-off event in the cosmos. And they meant the most existential question of all\u2014Are we alone<\/em>?<\/a>\u2014might soon be addressed. \u201cIf you do it, then human history is never the same,\u201d says Casey Dreier<\/a>, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes planetary exploration and defense and the search for extraterrestrial life.<\/p>\n But the only way to confirm whether these seeds and spots are the fossilized imprint of alien biology is to bring a sample of that rock home to study.\u00a0<\/p>\n Perseverance was the first stage of an ambitious scheme to do just that\u2014in effect, to pull off a space heist. The mission\u2014called Mars Sample Return and planned by the US, along with its European partners\u2014would send a Rube Goldberg\u2013like series of robotic missions to the planet to capture pristine rocks. The rover\u2019s job was to find the most promising stones and extract samples; then it would pass them to another robot\u2014the getaway driver\u2014to take them off Mars and deliver them to Earth.<\/p>\n But now, just over a year and a half later, the project is on life support, with zero funding<\/a> flowing in 2026 and little backing left in Congress. As a result, those oh-so-promising rocks may be stuck out there forever.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve spent 50 years preparing to get these samples back. We\u2019re ready to do that,\u201d says Philip Christensen<\/a>, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who works closely with NASA. \u201cNow we\u2019re two feet from the finish line\u2014Oh, sorry, we\u2019re not going to complete the job<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n This also means that, in the race to find evidence of alien life, America has effectively ceded its pole position to its greatest geopolitical rival: China. The superpower is moving full steam ahead with its own version of MSR. It\u2019s leaner than America and Europe\u2019s mission, and the rock samples it will snatch from Mars will likely not be as high quality. But that won\u2019t be the headline people remember\u2014the one in the scientific journals and the history books. \u201cAt the rate we\u2019re going, there\u2019s a very good chance they\u2019ll do it before we do,\u201d laments Christensen. \u201cBeing there first is what matters.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, any finding of extraterrestrial life advances human knowledge writ large, no matter the identity of the discoverers. But there is the not-so-small issue of pride in an already heated nationalistic competition, not to mention the fact that many scientists in America (to say nothing of US lawmakers) don\u2019t necessarily want their future research and scientific progress subject to a foreign gatekeeper. And even for those not especially concerned about potentially unearthing alien microbes, MSR and the comparable Chinese mission are technological stepping stones toward a long-held dream shared by many beyond Elon Musk<\/a>: getting astronauts onto the Red Planet and, eventually, setting up long-term bases for astronauts there. It\u2019d be a huge blow to show up only after a competitor had already set up shop \u2026 or not to get there at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf we can\u2019t do this, how do we think we\u2019re gonna send humans there and get back safely?\u201d says Victoria Hamilton<\/a>, a planetary geologist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who is also the chair of the NASA-affiliated Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group.\u00a0<\/p>\n Or as Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist from the Washington University in St. Louis, puts it: \u201cIf you\u2019re going to bring humans back from Mars, you sure as shit have to figure out how to bring the samples back first.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Nearly a dozen project insiders and scientists in both the US and China shared with me the story of how America blew its lead in the new space race. It\u2019s full of wild dreams and promising discoveries\u2014as well as mismanagement, eye-watering costs, and, ultimately, anger and disappointment.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI spent most of my career studying Mars,\u201d says Christensen. There are countless things about it that bewitch him. But by examining it, he suspects, we\u2019ll get further than ever in the Homeric investigation of how life began.<\/p>\n Sure, the Mars of today is a postapocalyptic wasteland, an arid and cold desert bathed in lethal radiation. But billions of years ago, water lapped up against the slopes of fiery volcanoes that erupted under a clement sky. Then its geologic interior cooled down so quickly, changing everything. Its global magnetic field collapsed like a deflating balloon, and its protective atmosphere was stripped away by the sun.\u00a0<\/p>\n Its surface is now remarkably hostile to life as we know it. But deep below ground, where it\u2019s shielded from space, and where it\u2019s warmer and wetter, there could maybe be microbes inching about.<\/p>\n Scientists have long possessed several Martian meteorites that have been flung our way, but none of them are pristine; they were all damaged by cosmic radiation midflight, before getting scorched in Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Plus, there\u2019s another problem: \u201cWe currently have no rocks from Mars that are sedimentary, the rock type likely to contain fossils,\u201d says Sara Russell<\/a>, a planetary scientist at London\u2019s Natural History Museum.\u00a0<\/p>\n For those, humans (or robots) would need to get on the ground.<\/p>\n NASA first made the stuff of sci-fi films a reality 50 years ago, when two Viking landers touched down on the planet in 1976. One of their experiments dropped some radioactively tagged nutrients into soil samples, the idea being that if any microbes were present, they\u2019d gobble up the nutrients and burp out some radioactive waste gas that the landers could detect. Tantalizingly, this experiment hinted<\/a> that something microbe-like was interacting with those nutrients\u2014but the result was inconclusive (and today most scientists don\u2019t suspect biology was responsible).<\/p>\n Still, it was enough to elevate scientists\u2019 curiosity about the genuine possibility of Martian life. Over the coming decades, America sent an ever-expanding fleet of robots to Mars\u2014orbiting spacecraft, landers, and wheeled rovers. But no matter how hard they studied their adoptive planet\u2019s rocks, they weren\u2019t designed to definitively<\/em> detect signs of life. For that, promising-looking rocks would need to be captured and, somehow<\/a>, shuttled back to labs on Earth in carefully sealed containers.\u00a0<\/p>\n This became a top priority for the US planetary science community in 2003, following the publication of the first Planetary Decadal Survey<\/a>, a census conducted at NASA\u2019s request. The scientific case for the mission was clear\u2014even to the people who didn\u2019t<\/em> think they\u2019d find signs of life. \u201cI bet there isn\u2019t life on Mars. But if there is, or was, that would be an incredibly important discovery,\u201d says Christensen. And if not, \u201cWhy not?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n He adds: \u201cWe may understand more about why life started on Earth by understanding why it may not have started on Mars. What was that key difference between those two planets?\u201d<\/p>\n And so, MSR was born. America went all in, and the European Space Agency joined the team. Over the next decade or so, a complex<\/a> plan<\/a> was drawn up.\u00a0<\/p>\n First, a NASA rover would land on Mars in a spot that once was potentially habitable\u2014later determined to be Jezero Crater. It would zip about, look for layered rocks of the sort that you\u2019d find in lakes and riverbeds, extract cores of them, and cache them in sealed containers. Then a second NASA spacecraft would land on Mars, receive the rover\u2019s sample tubes (in one of several different ways), and transfer the samples to a rocket that would launch them into Martian orbit. A European-provided orbiter would catch that rocket like a baseball glove before returning home and dropping the rocks into Earth\u2019s atmosphere, where they would be guided, via parachute, to eagerly awaiting scientists no later than the mid-2030s.<\/p>\n \u201cPut simply, this is the most scientifically careful sample collection mission possible, conducted in one of the most promising places on Mars to look for signs of past life,\u201d says Jonathan Lunine<\/a>, the chief scientist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. \u201cAnd, of course, should evidence of life be found in the sediments, that would be an historic discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n It got off to an auspicious start. On July 30, 2020, in the throes of the covid-19 pandemic, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover launched atop a rocket from Florida\u2019s Cape Canaveral. The NASA administrator at the time, Jim Bridenstine, didn\u2019t mince words: \u201cWe are in extraordinary times right now,\u201d he told reporters, \u201cyet we have in fact persevered, and we have protected this mission because it is so important.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But just earlier that same month, the mission to Mars had turned into a race<\/em>. China was now prepping its own sample return spacecraft.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s when things for MSR started to unravel.\u00a0<\/p>\n China was comparatively late to develop a competitive space program, but once it began doing so, it wasted no time. In 2003, it first sent one of its astronauts into space, via its own bespoke rocket; in the two decades since, it has launched its own space station and sent multiple uncrewed spacecraft to the moon\u2014first orbiters, then landers\u2014as part of its Chang\u2019e Project<\/a>, named after a lunar goddess.\u00a0<\/p>\n But a real turning point for China\u2019s interplanetary ambitions came in 2020, the same year as Perseverance\u2019s launch to Mars.\u00a0<\/p>\n That December, Chang\u2019e-5<\/a> touched down in the moon\u2019s Ocean of Storms, a realm of frozen lava 1,600 miles long. It grabbed some 2-billion-year-old rocks, put them in a rocket, and blasted them into the firmament. The samples were captured by a small orbiting spacecraft; crucially, the idea was not all that dissimilar from how MSR imagined catching its own samples, baseball-glove style. China\u2019s lunar haul was then dropped off back on Earth just before Christmas. It marked the first time since 1976 that samples had been returned from the moon, and the mission was seamless.\u00a0<\/p>\n That same year, China made its first foray toward Mars. The project was called Tianwen-1<\/a>, meaning \u201cQuestions to Heaven\u201d\u2014the first in a new series of audacious space missions to the Red Planet and orbiting asteroids. While its success was far from guaranteed, China was willing to kick into high gear immediately,\u00a0sending both an orbiting spacecraft and a rover to Mars at the same time. No other country had ever managed to perform this act of spaceflight acrobatics on its first try.<\/p>\n Just as China ramped up its space schemes, some people in the scientific community began to wonder if NASA was (inadvertently) promising too much with MSR\u2014and whether the heist would be worth the cost.<\/p>\n In 2020, the price tag for the program had jumped from an already expensive $5.3 billion to an estimated $7 billion. (For context, NASA\u2019s Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, which is currently being pieced together, has a price tag of around $1.2 billion. This space observatory is designed to find Earthbound asteroids and is tasked with defending all 8 billion of us from a catastrophic impact.)<\/p>\n But Perseverance was already on its way to Mars. It wasn\u2019t as if this expensive train could go back to the station. The project\u2019s advocates just hoped it\u2019d actually make it there in one piece.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the US had previously entered Martian orbit successfully, several other entry, descent, and landing attempts on the planet had ended in explosive disaster; the primary antagonist is the Martian atmosphere, which can cause spacecraft to tumble wildly out of control or heat up and ignite. Perseverance would be traveling at nearly 12,500 miles per hour as it entered Mars\u2019s airspace, and to land it\u2019d need to decelerate, deploy a parachute, fire several rockets, and pilot itself to the skies above Jezero Crater\u2014before a levitating crane<\/a> would drop off the actual rover.\u00a0<\/p>\n Thankfully, Perseverance\u2019s deployment went off without a hitch. On February 18, 2021, Mars became its new home\u2014and the rover\u2019s makers hugged, high-fived, and whooped for joy in NASA\u2019s flight control room.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Lori Glaze, then director of\u00a0NASA\u2019s planetary science division,\u00a0said<\/a> at the time, \u201cNow the fun really starts.\u201d<\/p>\n That very same month, China arrived at Mars\u2019s doorstep for the first time.\u00a0<\/p>\n On February 10, 2021, Tianwen-1 began to orbit the planet. Then, on May 14, it slipped a drop shipment through the spacecraft-frying atmosphere to deliver a rover onto an expansive landscape called Utopia Planitia\u2014giving Perseverance a neighbor, albeit one 1,200 miles away.<\/p>\n This explorer was nowhere near as sophisticated as Perseverance, and its assignment was a far cry from a sample return mission. It had some cameras and scientific instruments for studying its environment, making it comparable to one of NASA\u2019s older rovers. It was also supposed to operate for just three months (though it ended up persisting for an entire year before being fatally smothered by pernicious Martian dust).\u00a0<\/p>\n Nevertheless, Tianwen-1 was a remarkable achievement for China, one that the US couldn\u2019t help but applaud. \u201cThis is a really big deal,\u201d said<\/a> Roger Launius, then NASA\u2019s chief historian.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n And even if grabbing pieces of Mars was increasingly likely in China\u2019s future, it was already happening<\/em> in the present for the US. The race, the Americans thought, was over before it had even begun \u2026 right?\u00a0<\/p>\n Over the next few years, Perseverance went on an extraterrestrial joyride. It meandered through frozen flows of lava and journeyed over fans of sediment once washed about by copious liquid water. It pulled out rocks<\/a> that preserved salty, muddy layers<\/a>\u2014exactly the environment that, on Earth, would be teeming with microorganisms and organic matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cJezero Crater clearly meets the astrobiological criterion for a sampling site where life may once have existed,\u201d says Lunine from NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Lab. \u201cRocks of broadly similar age and setting on Earth contain some of the earliest evidence for life on our own planet.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Then, in September 2023, as Perseverance was trundling across the ruins of what may once have been a microbial metropolis, an independent panel of researchers published a report<\/a> that made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that MSR was the opposite of okay<\/a>.<\/p>\n They found that the project was too decentralized among the nation\u2019s plethora of NASA centers, leaving confusion as to who was actually in charge. And at its current pace, MSR wouldn\u2019t get its Mars rocks back home until the 2040s at the earliest\u2014as much as a whole decade later than initial estimates. And it would cost as much as $11 billion, more than doubling the initial tab.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMSR was established with unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning,\u201d the report reads<\/a>. \u201cMSR was also organized under an unwieldy structure. As a result, there is currently no credible, congruent technical, nor properly margined schedule, cost, and technical baseline that can be accomplished with the likely available funding.\u201d<\/p>\n Members of Congress started to wonder aloud whether<\/a> MSR should be canceled outright, and the scientific community that had once so enthusiastically supported the mission faced a moment of reckoning.\u00a0<\/p>\n Byrne<\/a>, the planetary scientist from the Washington University in St. Louis, had always been something of a rebel, never really a fan of NASA\u2019s multi-decadal, over-the-top fascination with Mars. The solar system, he argued, is filled with curious worlds to explore\u2014especially Venus, another nearby rocky world that was once rather Earth-like<\/a>. Couldn\u2019t we spare some of NASA\u2019s budget<\/a> to make sure we explore Venus, too?<\/p>\n Still, like many other critical colleagues, Byrne did not want to see MSR put down. The report\u2019s findings didn\u2019t change the fact that Perseverance was dutifully working around the clock to accomplish the mission\u2019s opening stages. What would be the point of gathering all those samples if they were going to be left to stay on Mars? The community, Byrne explains, just needed to answer one question: \u201cHow do you do this in a way that\u2019s faster and cheaper?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In April 2024, NASA publicly sought help from its industry partners in the space sector: Could anyone come up with a way to save MSR? Various players with spaceflight experience, like Lockheed Martin<\/a>, sent in proposals for consideration.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then, just a few months later in July 2024, Perseverance came in clutch, finding those special leopard-spotted and speckled rocks in an old river valley\u2014a sign of hope that NASA had been desperately seeking. Now the agency\u2019s request for help was all the more urgent\u2014these rocks had to get home. After various panels<\/a> assessed plans that could effectively save MSR, two potential options for a faster, leaner, less expensive version were previewed<\/a> at a January 2025 press briefing.\u00a0<\/p>\n One option brought in tried-and-tested tech: Since Perseverance had been safely deployed onto the surface of Mars using a hovering platform known as a sky crane, it was proposed that the sample-gathering lander for MSR could also be dropped off using a sky crane, which would simplify this step and reduce the overall cost of the program. The other suggestion was that the lander could be delivered to Mars via a spaceship from a commercial spaceflight company. The lander design itself could also be streamlined, and tweaks could be made to the rocket that would launch the samples back into space.<\/p>\n The proposals needed greater study, but everyone\u2019s spirits were lifted by the fact these plans could<\/em>, at least theoretically, get samples back in the 2030s, not the 2040s. And, crucially, \u201cit was possible to get the cost down,\u201d says Jack Mustard<\/a>, an Earth and planetary scientist at Brown University and a member<\/a> of one of the two proposal-reviewing panels. Still, it didn\u2019t save a lot: They could do MSR for $8 billion.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we came up with was very reasonable, rational, much simpler,\u201d says Christensen, who was part of the same review panel. \u201cAnd $8 billion is about the right amount it would take to guarantee that it\u2019s going to work.\u201d<\/p>\n While the US became increasingly consumed with its own interplanetary woes, China was riding high.<\/p>\n In June 2024, the sixth installment in the Chang\u2019e project made history. It was another lunar sample return mission, but this one did something nobody had ever done in the history of spaceflight: It landed on the difficult-to-reach, out-of-view far side of the moon and snagged samples from it.\u00a0<\/p>\n China made it look effortless when a capsule containing matter from this previously untouched region safely landed in Inner Mongolia. Long Xiao, a planetary geoscientist at the China University of Geosciences, told reporters<\/a> at the time that the mission\u2019s success was \u201ca cause for celebration for all humanity.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But it was also effectively a bombshell for NASA. Yes, the moon is much closer to Earth, and it doesn\u2019t have a spaceship-destroying atmosphere like Mars. But China was speedrunning through the race while America was largely looking the other way.<\/p>\n Then, in May 2025, China launched Tianwen-2<\/a>. Its destination was not Mars but a near-Earth asteroid. The plan is that it will scoop up some of the space rock\u2019s primordial pebbles later this year and deliver them back to Earth in late 2027. In light of China\u2019s past successes, many suspect it\u2019ll nail this project, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n But perhaps the biggest blow to the US came in June 2025: China revealed its formal designs on returning samples from Mars\u2014and potentially addressing the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Chinese researchers outlined a bold plan<\/a> for Tianwen-3 in the journal Nature Astronomy<\/em>. \u201cSearching for signs of life, or astrobiology studies, are the first priority,\u201d says Yuqi Qian, a lunar geologist at the University of Hong Kong. And while many observers had long been cognizant of this ambition, seeing it so clearly spelled out in academic writing made it real<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe selection of the landing site is still ongoing,\u201d says <\/strong>Li Yiliang<\/a>, an astrobiologist at the University of Hong Kong, an author of the Tianwen-3 study, and a member of the spacecraft\u2019s landing site selection team. But the paper notes, in no uncertain terms, that the mission will move at a breakneck pace. \u201cThe aim of China\u2019s Mars sample return mission, known as Tianwen-3, is to collect at least 500g of samples from Mars and return them to Earth around 2031.\u201d<\/p>\n 2031<\/em>. Even on its original, speedier timeline, America\u2019s MSR plan wouldn\u2019t get samples back by that date. So how is China planning to pull it off?<\/p>\n Qian explains that Tianwen-3 is building on the success of the lunar sample return program. Doing something similar for Mars is a rather giant technological leap (requiring two rockets, not one)\u2014but, he argues, \u201cthe technologies here are similar.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The plan is for a duet of rockets to blast off from Earth in 2028. The first will contain the lander-ascender combination, or LAC. The second is the orbiter-returner combination, or ORC. The LAC will get to Mars and deploy a lander as well as a small helicopter, which will scout promising locations around the landing site while using a claw to bring several small samples back to the lander.<\/p>\n The LAC will then travel to the most promising site. The lander\u2019s drill, which can get down to around seven feet below the surface, is the most important part of the mission. At that depth, there are greater odds of capturing signs of past life. When at least 500 grams of pristine rocks have been loaded aboard the lander, the samples will be launched into space, where the orbiter will be waiting to capture them and send them back home sometime in 2031.<\/p>\n \u201cThe returned samples will be quarantined strictly in an under-planning facility near Hefei city,\u201d says Yiliang. And there, in those bio-secure labs, scientists might very well find the first clear signs of alien life, past or present.<\/p>\n The very same month that Chinese researchers published their daring plans for returning Mars samples, the new Trump administration released a draconian NASA budget<\/a> for Congress to consider\u2014one that sparked panic across the planetary science community.<\/p>\n If enacted, it would have been a historic catastrophe for the venerable space agency, giving NASA its smallest budget since 1961. This would have forced it to let go of a huge number of staffers, slash its science program budget in half, and terminate 19 missions currently in operation<\/a>. MSR was in the crosshairs<\/a>, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cGrim is the word,\u201d says Dreier of the Planetary Society.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over the next few months, Congress pushed back<\/a> on the potential gutting of NASA, but largely to save ongoing solar system exploration missions. MSR was not considered an active effort; Perseverance was effectively a scientific scout acting independently by this point. A counterproposal by the House offered up $300 million for MSR, but no policymaker was cheerleading for it. (The US Office of Management and Budget, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and the office of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation did not respond to requests for comment.)<\/p>\n \u201cMars Sample Return doesn\u2019t seem to have very many advocates right now,\u201d says Byrne. The project \u201cisn\u2019t featuring in anyone\u2019s conversation at the moment, with all of the existential shit that\u2019s happening to NASA.\u201d Everyone working on a NASA mission hoped that they, and their spacecraft, would survive the onslaught. As Byrne adds: \u201c[People are] just trying to keep their heads down.\u201d<\/p>\n Researchers in America suddenly found themselves at an inflection point. \u201cThe attack on science, and the attack on NASA science, has been very successful, in that it has completely demoralized the science community,\u201d says Christensen. \u201cEveryone\u2019s in a state of shock.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n When I contacted NASA in July about the state of MSR, which was then in the middle of a months-long limbo, I was told that experts weren\u2019t available to comment. Roxana Bardan, a spokesperson, instead sent a statement: \u201cUnder President Trump\u2019s America First agenda, NASA is committed to sustained U.S. space leadership. We will continue to innovate, explore, and excel to ensure American preeminence in space.\u201d (The agency did not respond to a follow-up request for comment.)\u00a0<\/p>\n That notion stood in direct contrast to what Christensen told me around the same time.\u00a0\u201cThe US \u2026 has led the exploration of Mars for 50 years,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd as we approach one of the key discovery points, we\u2019re about to concede that leadership to someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n From China\u2019s perspective, the fumbling of MSR is more confusing than anything else. \u201cNASA has so well prepared for her MSR mission in both technology and science, and I and my colleagues have learned so much from NASA\u2019s scientific communities,\u201d says Yiliang.\u00a0<\/p>\n And if China wins the race because America decided to shoot itself in the foot? \u201cThis is sad,\u201d he says. \u201cIf this comes true, I believe the Chinese will not be that happy to win the race in this way.\u201d<\/p>\n Tianwen-3 will still have to overcome many of the same hurdles as MSR. Nobody, for example, has autonomously launched a rocket of any kind off the surface of Mars. But many believe the Chinese can succeed, even at their program\u2019s superspeed. Christensen, for one, fully expected several of their past robotic missions to the moon and Mars to fail\u2014but \u201cthe fact that they pulled it off the first time really says a lot about their engineering capability,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mustard agrees: \u201cThey know how to land; they know how to leave. I have a lot of confidence that they\u2019ve learned enough from the lunar work that they\u2019ll be able to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Plus, Tianwen-3\u2019s architecture is simpler than the US-European mission. It has fewer components, and fewer points of potential failure. This also means, though, that the quality of the loot will be somewhat lacking. Tianwen-3 will sample from only one small patch of Mars. Conversely, Perseverance is roving around a vast and geologically diverse landscape, sampling as it goes, which would translate to \u201cliterally orders of magnitude more science than what will come from the Chinese samples,\u201d says Christensen.<\/p>\n But China could serendipitously land on a biologically rich patch of the planet. As the Southwest Research Institute\u2019s Hamilton says, the mission could \u201cpick up something entirely unexpected and, you know, miraculous.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The likeliest outcome is still that neither nation finds fossilized microbes, but that China brings back rocks from Mars first. At the end of the day, that\u2019s what Americans (and Europeans) will hear: \u201cYou\u2019re second. You lost,\u201d says Mustard.<\/p>\n Like many of his colleagues, Christensen is irked by the thought of losing the race to Mars, because it would be such an own goal. The US has been sending robots over there for decades and investing billions in forging the technology that would be required to make MSR a success. And suddenly \u201cthe Chinese come along and say, Thank you very much, we\u2019ll take all of that information\u2014we\u2019ll build one mission and go and do what you guys did the groundwork for<\/em>,\u201d Christensen says. \u201cAs a taxpayer, I\u2019m like: It just seems foolish to me.\u201d<\/p>\n Even the MSR skeptics concede that this kind of loss would have sweeping ramifications. Byrne worries that if something like MSR can be snuffed out so easily, what\u2019s to say the next big mission\u2014to Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond\u2014won\u2019t suffer the same ignoble fate? In other words, the death of MSR would severely damage \u201cthe ability of the planetary community to dream big,\u201d he says. \u201cIf we don\u2019t pull this off, what does that mean? Are we not going to do big, expensive, difficult things?\u201d<\/p>\n Another big, expensive, difficult thing? Putting humans on Mars. Both critics and advocates of MSR largely agree it is an invaluable dress rehearsal<\/a>. Making sure you can safely launch a rocket off Mars is a necessary prerequisite to ensuring that an array of equipment can survive for a long time on the planet\u2019s lethal surface.<\/p>\n China, too, has explicitly acknowledged this. As one of the first lines of the Tianwen-3 study states, \u201cMars is the most promising planet for humanity\u2019s expansion beyond Earth, with its potential for future habitability and accessible resources.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Though such expansion is still of course a far-future dream, it\u2019s not hard to see how losing the race here would put the US at a huge disadvantage. Members of America\u2019s planetary science community say that to try to sway politicians in their favor, they have framed MSR as a national security issue. But they haven\u2019t had much luck. \u201cWe\u2019ve been in discussions with decision-makers who have never heard that perspective before,\u201d says the Planetary Society\u2019s Dreier.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt is surprising that doesn\u2019t have more weight,\u201d adds Mustard.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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