![]() It includes a Sample Return Lander being built by JPL, a sample Fetch Rover or sample fetch helicopter, I should say, also being potentially built by JPL, a Mars Ascent vehicle being built by Marshall Space Flight Center, a containment and capture device to live inside of a European provided orbiter called the Earth Return orbiter that will bring back these samples launched from the surface of Mars to Earth sometime in the 2030s. Just as a reminder, Mars Sample Return is a multi-mission effort to retrieve the samples already being collected right now by Perseverance on the surface of Mars. We’re going to talk to him about that report, but I wanted to touch on a few aspects first, just to set the stage. Recently, he chaired the Independent Review Board for the Mars Sample Return project. He was previously the director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, he was the Deputy Associate Administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, and he’s been an aerospace consultant contributing to various important reports for NASA to help guide the future of these programs over the past 10 years. But as currently constituted, it is not set up for success and so, and I am far from the only one saying so, things are looking grim.Ĭasey Dreier: My guest, Orlando Figueroa has vast experience in NASA and Mars exploration during his more than three decades of experience in the aerospace industry. This makes me sad – I am more desperate than most for Mars samples back on Earth, and the opportunity to really look for traces of past life with the best scientific equipment our advanced civilization can bring to bear! I want the samples, and I want MSR to succeed. The result is a series of compromises that require Rube Goldberg sequencing, no central authority or responsibility that can fight for mission success, and billions of dollars of R&D on technologies that will probably never be used ever again. ![]() In addition to that, it specifically avoids solving key problems, such as Mars downmass capacity, that would both greatly simplify the mission (albeit at some cost) and also feed forward into future human exploration. The brief summary is that MSR’s architecture, pictured below, is incredibly complicated, slow, and expensive. In this post, I provide that commentary on the relevant parts of the interview below in italics. ![]() In this interview, the quiet part was said out loud to a surprising degree, creating space for useful commentary. The transcript is apparently AI-generated and may have occasional errors. Previously, my opinions on this topic were so obscure, so controversial, and so retrograde that I could barely hint at them in public for fear that the message would be lost.īut last week, a remarkable interview occurred on Planetary Radio between Casey Dreier – Planetary Science Space Policy director and Orlando Figueroa, the industry veteran who chaired the Mars Sample Return Independent Review Board. The usual disclaimers apply! I no longer work at, and do not speak for, JPL. As a dubious public service, I humbly offer my translation and light editorializing to help inform less catastrophic space geeks what is happening with MSR.
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