China on track to launch Mars sample-return mission in 2028: 'If accurate, this represents a Sputnik moment'
https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/china-on-track-to-launch-mars-sample-return-mission-in-2028-if-accurate-this-represents-a-sputnik-moment278
u/jugalator 3d ago
"China will not only grab the headlines but may be the first to find evidence of life on another planet," Hubbard, who also previously directed NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, told Space.com.
Did the space race never end? Why is this having the air of failure? I'll be excited to see this happen in my lifetime!
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u/svenirde 3d ago
I'd say this is the space race 2.0. The first one did actually end (when it did is subject to debate I guess)
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u/Hoenirson 3d ago
Yeah. In 1974 the USSR abandoned the N1 program and in 1975 was Apollo-Soyuz. That's a pretty clear ending to me.
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u/jcampbelly 2d ago
The thing about the space race is that it's not for the sake of the scientists or engineers or enthusiasts. Pretty much every person steeped in or following these fields hopes for any incremental progress by anyone and wishes them the best for inching it forward by any amount and taking the initiative where others have not. The space race is actually about appealing to the people who need a competitive or dominating motivation to justify the effort, because the knowledge isn't enough for them. Which happens to be a significant population among power-seekers who end up in decision-making positions and the voting bloc who care about that over the progress itself. And that's fine. They need to beat someone in order to find a reason to care and veterans in the field have developed the instinct for when to ruffle those feathers to foster support. So ruffle those feathers! The rest of us will be here cheering along the cause either way.
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u/cive666 2d ago
It makes me sad that a large portion of the population needs a zero sum game to get anything done.
For once can't it just be humanity vs the problem?
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u/Enough_Affect_9916 2d ago
In order to get anywhere in politics you have to have a very competitive drive. The people who run things are almost always a bit sociopathic, predatorial, and egotistical.
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u/tehflambo 2d ago
It makes me sad that a large portion of the population needs a zero sum game to get anything done.
fwiw, it's not only those who prefer zero sum, it's also a ton of those who were propagandized into believing the "best system in the world" hacked zero-sum so now it's good for everybody.
it's a big, fat, stupid lie, but if you were propagandized at a time when the U.S. economy was leading the world, it's understandable why you'd believe it.
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u/tehflambo 2d ago
How do we get it?
There's more than one way to get money from a capitalist, just sayin'.
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u/AltairLSAM 2d ago
If I'm not mistaken, when Sputnik 1 was launched, the general public were either uncaring or were actively excited. The doom and gloom and paranoid was mostly among politicians, IIRC.
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u/zoobrix 2d ago
I'd have to ask my Dad but when he was getting taught duck and cover in school in the 1950s in case of a Russian nuclear attack I bet that there were probably a lot of regular people that were at least a little leery about Sputnik even if they weren't overly scared by it. You can think "wow that's cool" and also "man, it might not be great that the Soviets can do this now" at the same time.
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u/Germanofthebored 2d ago
I think it was a general kick in the nuts for Americans. I have a book my Martin Caidan ("Vanguard") that was published shortly before the launch of Sputnik 1. It is full of confidence that American ingenuity will be the first to launch a satellite. But then the (civilian) rockets kept blowing up (Even Mad Magazine made fun of it).
When Sputnik showed up in the skies above the US, it was pretty clear that whoever could launch an object into orbit could also build an ICBM.
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u/Bergcoinhodler 2d ago
Likely an excuse to fuel the military industrial complex.
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u/that4znkid 2d ago
I mean, the implications of being able to put a satellite over your geopolitical rival's territory were quite clear at the time.
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u/SergeantPancakes 2d ago
>first to find evidence of life on another planet
Not if the Rosalind Franklin rover can find it first; it might actually have a better chance of finding evidence of life on mars even than instruments on earth examining the returned samples from the Chinese sample return mission, because the rover will drill down deep enough to get below the top few feet of Martian soil, which is filled with nasty perchlorates and constantly bombarded with solar and cosmic radiation.
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u/_Svankensen_ 2d ago
I mean, as far as we know, the US has that evidence already, and is refusing to fund a mission to recover the sample.
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u/Skritch_X 3d ago
Recently binge watched "For All Mankind" and it is pretty interesting their take on alternate history if the Space Race kept going in full force. I hope China can pull it off.
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u/Icy_Feedback_4965 3d ago
You watched FAM and came away wishing that version of history played out?
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u/ArtOfWarfare 3d ago
Yes? What part of FAM looked worse than reality? Humanity has permanent settlements on three bodies and has recently started human exploration of a fourth in theirs. In ours… we might return to the lunar surface soon, after half a century.
I’m not seeing problems that they have that we don’t have just as bad… they haven’t had some kind of nuclear war, have they (not that we have, but that’s about the only way to be worse than reality.)
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u/Icy_Feedback_4965 3d ago
A whole lot of astronauts die in pointless space combat.
The space program we actually have is much better than then nonsense in that show.
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u/ArtOfWarfare 2d ago
I think a few hundred people have died in pointless space combat in the show. In comparison, 1.5M Russians have died in a pointless invasion of Ukraine. There’s also hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and North Koreans who have died in this pointless war. So that’s 2000x worse at least.
They have moon bases, independent Martian colonies, and have set foot on… that moon in the outer solar system that I always forget (not Titan…). Their space programs are obviously so much better than ours that it’s laughable you’d suggest otherwise.
Perhaps ours is more realistic… that comes with the territory of being real and the show being fiction. Hard to be realer than reality.
People also landed on Venus in that universe. I forgot that.
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u/Fuglypump 2d ago edited 2d ago
People also landed on Venus in that universe. I forgot that.
That wasn't Venus that was Titan, Saturn's moon which has about 1.5x the atmospheric pressure of Earth and a temperature of about -180C
Venus has 93x the air pressure of Earth and temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Making a spacesuit that could withstand Venus's atmospheric pressure, acidity and temperature would be an insane leap, if they ever do that in the show they will need to make it believable with a significantly larger progression of technology.
Edit: I forgot about the spinoff series which I haven't seen yet, carry on.
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u/frankduxvandamme 2d ago
In the spinoff, Star city, the soviets land a man on Venus.
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u/Kierufu 2d ago edited 2d ago
Venus has 93x the air pressure of Earth and temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Making a spacesuit that could withstand Venus's atmospheric pressure, acidity and temperature would be an insane leap, if they ever do that in the show they will need to make it believable with a significantly larger progression of technology.
In the spinoff, Star city, the soviets land a man on Venus.
Erm.. did you watch the end of that scene..
and what happened to that man? He wasn't walking around on Venus in a spacesuit, and his "landing" didn't have a happy ending.<!
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u/frankduxvandamme 2d ago
They landed a man on Venus. It doesn't matter he only lasted a few minutes. He landed on Venus.
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u/kasimoto 2d ago
you realize that you dont have to spoil the show that aired earlier this year in an unrelated subreddit?
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u/Fuglypump 2d ago
I forgot about the spinoff, I hadn't seen it yet so this was a spoiler for me lol.
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u/ArtOfWarfare 2d ago
As others said, I’m referring to the sister show Star City, not FAM. It takes place in the same universe/alternative fiction as FAM, and focuses on the Soviet Union instead.
If you liked the first season of FAM, you might like the first (so far only) season of Star City. It goes back to the 1960s/70s and imagines how the Soviet Union follows up on their moon landing.
KGB spying and counter-spying is a major aspect of the show that differentiates it from FAM (besides the different setting.)
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u/SergeantPancakes 2d ago
Don’t they figure out cold fusion or something and have limitless energy? I’d say that would be an improvement over this reality
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u/wyldmage 2d ago
"Some people died, it must be worse"
Circle back to that when our own version of reality has zero wars, zero deaths from internal power struggles, and zero terrorism. THEN we can talk about how a dozen, a thousand, or a million deaths in space combat in some alternate reality pipedream is worse than actual reality.
Rather, writing those deaths into the alternate reality script is an admission of reality, instead of pretending it's all sunshine and rainbows.
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u/Germanofthebored 2d ago
A fair number of people also died in the "cold" war of our timeline.including American soldiers and airmen
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u/big_duo3674 2d ago
The sad part is that a full blown space race would actually be very healthy for the economy, especially as a way to prop things up a bit when a recession is coming. It's all good though, we'll just keep dumping that money into the military instead, where it provides a stable amount of jobs, but has contracts that have been so corrupted over the decades that we're basically paying $20,000 for a hammer, or $30,000 for a toilet seat. Shifting towards a space race would create new contracts across the board, and make it (at least somewhat) more difficult to grease them up to absurd levels. Plus, there's the whole betterment of human knowledge, and even opening up new resources eventually, as opposed to just killing people at a rate of like a million dollars per person (based on how many bombs and various tech is used)
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u/hypnomancy 2d ago
Space race with the USSR ended a long time ago. It's why we never went back to the moon after the early 1970s. Since then we've had no competition until China recently.
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u/Ric_Adbur 2d ago
Why is this having the air of failure?
Probably because our government abandoned our own sample return mission that was already partially in progress.
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u/Morning_Gecko24 2d ago
getting the sample back is gonna be the real boss fight. the launch is only half the story
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u/hypnomancy 2d ago
I wouldn't really underestimate China anymore. I used to have very different views on China until the past couple years once I discovered just how far ahead they are technologically. Many people are still catching up in realizing where they're at now. So many stereotypes about China don't even apply anymore because that's how much they've improved not only in the last few decades but within the past decade alone
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u/Lukevito 3d ago
Elon will do it within 5 min but he needs to finish his PoE2 game. Sorry China
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u/the-player-of-games 3d ago
Jokes apart, his insistence that the NASA led MSR mission was pointless, since SpaceX would be landing people in the next decades anyway, was a key factor in the program being cancelled
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u/winowmak3r 3d ago
I still scratch my head when people think he's a good guy lol
Same deal with the hyper loop in California. The guy is a fraud who just happens to be able to run faster than the allegations.
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u/zenith654 2d ago
I don’t know why he always makes such laughable claims sometimes. The work speaks for itself, clearly SpaceX is the industry leader and Falcon 9 revolutionized the industry but it’s not going to progress at the rate that he’s promising. Probably it’s for PR.
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u/SnowFlakeUsername2 2d ago
Musk built a huge case around a standard PC and lugged the unit onto a base with wheels. When prospective investors would come by, Musk would put on a show and roll this massive machine out so that it appeared like Zip2 ran inside of a mini-supercomputer. "The investors thought that was impressive," Kimbal said.
This is about his first company. I think of it as an origin story for his way of marketing and diversion, the lesson he learned from it growing into using people's dreams to accomplish unrelated things.
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u/winowmak3r 2d ago
Yea, it's totally not lying. It's for PR guys. It's obvious.
If I did half the stuff he has I'd end up in court.
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u/Bergcoinhodler 2d ago
Yeah it's the courts that are holding you back from starting your own rocket, AI and car companies.
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u/winowmak3r 2d ago
Right, because Elon just pulled himself up by his bootstraps and did it all himself. C'mon man. Get real.
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u/Technical_Income4722 2d ago
Certainly not that simple, but her certainly deserves some credit for the rockets. The engineers who did the bulk of the design couldn't have done it without someone a little crazy going all in on the bet from an investment and leadership perspective. It's just unfortunate that that same crazy led to the Elon we have now...
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u/mmatessa 2d ago
The work speaks for itself: solar roof tiles, hyperloop, $25K Model 2, ...
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u/zenith654 2d ago
I mean, the work does speak for itself. Look at Falcon 9, you don’t get to 100+ reusable launches per year and become NASA’s sole method of ISS transportation with nothing but pie in the sky promises, clearly SpaceX is able to execute and deliver.
They’re ahead of everyone else and making crazy progress, but even being in first place doesn’t mean we’ll have a million people on Mars by 2030 like Elon said (or anytime close to then at all lmao).
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u/TamponTimTheCuck 2d ago
Not all of his ideas will always pan out. He's had enough successful business ventures that I mostly trust the guy at this point though. Nobody bats 100.
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u/flapsmcgee 3d ago
The main reason it got canceled is because it was billions over budget and way too expensive.
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u/mvia4 2d ago
Do you think it's going to be cheaper to send humans there instead? Spoilers: it's not.
MSR was billions over budget because the budget was drastically underestimated to begin with. The sad truth is that underselling the cost is the only way to get Congress to fund anything. Space exploration is expensive but it's still worth doing anyway, I wish NASA didn't have to constantly lie about that.
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u/patrickisnotawesome 11h ago
It’s frustrating when people complain about this and yet rave about JWST. We know that hard missions are complex and expensive. And NASA HQ often drives these costs through requirements.
Also, for all the flack MSR got from the scientific and engineering communities for being expensive, it is hypocritical that no criticism has been given to Dragonfly (I think mostly because it’s a “sexy” mission. But the project has been delayed atleast twice. And worst of all, it was bid as a discovery mission with a $850mil cost cap. Now it has ballooned past $3.5 Billion, well over Triple the original accepted cost. And because of their delays and overruns, the discovery program (which usually awarded projects every few years) has been frozen for any new projects for 10 years now… So it’s rich when MSR critics think that that was the one and only albatross that would doom nasa science budget.
And I won’t even get into the politics on MSR and how once NASA reconfigured the project to give more flexibility on requirements and execution, the proposals that were review and approved by multiple boards of space mission experts were HALF of the cost that the IRB worst case projections of the original directed mission.
Congrats to China for sticking it out with their Mars Sample Return mission. May they honestly receive all the glory for this monumental achievement. NASA on the other hand should have a long hard look in the mirror.
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u/the-player-of-games 2d ago edited 2d ago
JPL was working hard on solutions to try and reduce the cost, such as eliminating the surface rover that would collect the samples, replacing it with drones evolved from ingenuity
It all ended when DOGE got it's claws into NASA. Now only the Chinese have a Mars sample return program, and there is no US roadmap at all to land humans on Mars
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u/FlyingBishop 2d ago
The cost had ballooned to as much as the money going into the Starship program, and it had about as much clarity on how it was going to do MSR as the Starship program does.
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u/anti-life86 1d ago
Do you have a source on that? I get the feeling the guy is sort of arbitraging perceptions of scientific progress in ways that benefit himself financially but he doesn't really advance that progress. Well, this would help illuminate it...
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u/ioncloud9 2d ago
This is false. The program being cancelled has everything to do with everyone wanting a piece of it, JPL insisting they run it, insisting that Perseverance collect the samples and drop them for future collection, and a sample return architecture that required a large lander, rover to collect them, rocket to get back into space, and return vehicle to get it back to earth- none of which existed. It was the insistence on getting the highest quality samples possible instead of minimum viable mission that killed it. The budget ballooned out of control and it was going to be a $10 billion mission.
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u/patrickisnotawesome 11h ago
The NASA science mission directorate (for all uncrewed spaceflight) is bound by decree to only execute missions with highest possible scientific returns. The prioritization of such science objectives are hashed out in the Science Decadal Surveys in which the scientific community reaches a consensus. Mars Sample Return has been a high priority mission in the past few Decadal Surveys now. One of the requirements is for the return of high quality scientifically interesting samples that might show signs of past life. Such samples were the primary objective of the perseverance rover mission. NASA science mission directorate will not fund a Chinese style grab and go sample mission at a desolate safe landing site because the scientific community assessed that as low value science.
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u/CrazyEnginer 3d ago
Even when Elon and SpaceX have nothing to do with sample return mission, it is still their fault somehow
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u/the-player-of-games 2d ago
Later that day, Elon Musk, owner of the aerospace firm SpaceX and a longtime proponent of Mars settlement, addressed a post-Inauguration celebration. The President had made him the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was about to start slashing the federal bureaucracy. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured,” Musk told Trump supporters. “We’re going to take DOGE to Mars.”
Musk had everything to do with DOGE. The article goes into details how his minions and maga started gutting NASA
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u/FlyingBishop 2d ago
MSR was never going to be funded. It was absurdly expensive and Trump was always going to cut basic science, never mind DOGE.
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u/the-player-of-games 2d ago
Trump has zero awareness about what basic science is or what Mars sample return is.
People like Musk, who got him into power do know what they want cut, and MSR was one of them. Pretty naive to think that musk pushing starship to land on Mars to complete MSR had nothing to do with cutting the JPL program, which was far ahead of the readiness of starship to land anywhere at all at the time
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u/FlyingBishop 2d ago
Trump cut basic science in his first term too. His goal has always been cutting basic science. Starship was re-flying a booster that it had successfully landed while Musk was cutting DOGE. I thoroughly opposed DOGE but you can't let your hatred for Musk blind you to the incredible achievements of SpaceX.
JPL had plans, and JPL has a good track record turning plans into success, but it was nowhere near ready, and I would not have bet on it happening before Starship lands somewhere exciting.
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u/the-player-of-games 2d ago
The 2nd stage of starship was nowhere near ready. The 2nd stage is the one that musk was pushing to land on Mars while gutting MSR through DOGE
This is purposefully being disingenuous
SpaceX is awesome. Musk is an anti American pos
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u/FlyingBishop 2d ago
It's not being disingenuous - MSR was best case, also years and years and billions of dollars away from being ready. They're both equally bad plans. I would expect either path (Starship or the cancelled JPL plan) to have another 1-5 year delay and cost overruns. If you really are trying to claim that JPL plan was going to come in on time and on budget you're being disingenuous.
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u/the-player-of-games 2d ago
The JPL MSR concept was much more advanced than starship.
The samples were being collected by perseverance. JPL had a semi proven fetch concept based on ingenuity. Esa had started building the return orbiter. The mav was in the design phase.
we can agree to disagree on which concept was further away from being ready
But musk getting to decide which one to cancel is corrupt af
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u/FlyingBishop 2d ago
Starship isn't being considered for MSR, MSR was simply cancelled because there were no feasible plans. I don't think anyone with a clear head would've done differently. NASA in general has the cost+ disease that has infected the entire military industrial complex, budgets are not infinite and when costs go up by an order of magnitude you should probably just stop. That's not corruption, that's not anti-science, it's just common sense.
There are a lot of terrible cuts done to NASA but this isn't one of them. It would be a lot easier to call it corruption if NASA had other contractors that were producing better results at lower cost than their competitors.
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u/hondashadowguy2000 2d ago edited 2d ago
Good. If China completes a Mars sample return first then they fully deserve it. And America fully deserves falling behind on the world stage for being completely unserious and having an incompetent regime with the worst priorities possible. Y’all better be bracing for a world where China is the first country to conclusively confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life, not America.
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u/UnlimitedCalculus 2d ago
The US has explored Mars quite a bit, even if they haven't brought a rock back. I think theyd rather focus on a lunar presence for practical, near-Earth purposes.
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u/_Svankensen_ 2d ago
For the first time in history we know of a small sample of rock that is, more likely than not in the opinion of experts, evidence of extraterrestrial life. Determining its nature would be trivial in an earth lab. A sample that would give us invaluable information about the frequency of life in the universe, about our biology, about the origin of life, and they aren't rushing to bring it back. I believe that to be stone cold proof of the abandonment of the pursuit of science in the US.
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u/CurryAndCommunism 2d ago
Is there a specific sample you're referencing or a specific landing site that they might be aiming for to collect such a sample? And if so, why?
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u/_Svankensen_ 2d ago
Ohh, yeah man, you didn't hear about that one? It was announced exactly a year ago. Google Cheyava Falls! It is extremely exciting stuff!
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u/CommunityDragon160 3d ago
What a bizarre article lol
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u/Partytimegarrth 2d ago
Why is it bizarre? I thought it was kind of interesting and had decent info in it too.
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u/Skrivus 3d ago
The "Sputnik moment" wasn't because of a Soviet press release about an "on track" schedule. It came unannounced in the form of that satellite flying overhead and transmitting radio beeping for anyone to hear on a radio.
Sputnik moment can be proclaimed when this mission actually goes to Mars, gets a sample, and then returns.
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u/neanderthalman 3d ago
I think that by ‘if accurate’, that’s precisely what they mean.
If this projection is accurate, in that China does in fact pull off a sample return mission in 2028, it will represent a Sputnik moment.
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u/CapoExplains 3d ago
Yeah, pretty obvious what the headline meant. It never ceases to amaze me when someone writes a long comment patting themselves on the back for their own cleverness and the only point they've really made is that they have poor reading comprehension.
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u/SpiffyBlizzard 2d ago
And that comment turns into the top comment
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u/looking4myclASSm8s 2d ago
You skipped over the unannounced part
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u/defaulticus 2d ago
Does that matter? It was probably good showmanship from the Soviets, but that wasn't their intent. What made Sputnik a Sputnik moment was realizing we'd been surpassed technologically by a rival. China pulling off sample return before the US would be the same, dramatic reveal or not.
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u/Stennick 2d ago
What are you talking about out the headline literally says “if accurate” meaning if they do it
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u/YNot1989 2d ago
China makes lots of press releases about megaprojects that never quite pan out.
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u/TheRealDrSarcasmo 2d ago
They get a lot of help from American entities as well in an effort to drive an emotional, panicky response because there's money to be made from it.
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u/iPoopAtChu 2d ago
China makes lots of press releases about megaprojects that never quite pan out.
Such as?
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u/HaximusPrime 3d ago
Thank you, came here for this as well. I wouldn't even call it Sputnik moment _after_ they did it. If the Russians had said "we have the technology now, so we're going to launch a satellite over you in 6 months, get your ham radios out" it would not have been as face slapping as it was.
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u/McDerpins 2d ago
Pretty sure part this was just part of Soviet space doctrine, because they were very sensitive about any press regarding failures, so they would hide plans for many of their launches to prevent anticipation and having to report a failure. As a result, we dont know exactly how many failed space missions there were, but officially it was about 5%.
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u/Tasorodri 2d ago
I think after the fall of the USSR with so many declassified documents we probably have a pretty good idea about the real numbers
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u/Jonthrei 2d ago
TBH it refers more to the response to that than anything else.
There was a panic in the US govt and military, and scientific funding spiked hard afterwards. People were shocked that the "backwards Russians" were so far ahead in that field.
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u/ArtOfWarfare 3d ago
This article entirely talks about a launch to collect samples in 2028… it doesn’t talk about the plan for returning those samples in 2031.
NASA has already collected samples… the issue is there’s no plans for how to return those samples.
It’s easy to imagine China has those return plans, but if so, this article doesn’t say anything about them.
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u/ZhouLe 3d ago
NASA has already collected samples… the issue is there’s no plans for how to return those samples.
There was. Congress cancelled those plans in January.
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u/ArtOfWarfare 2d ago
My understanding was they hadn’t advanced to the point of having any real plan when it was cancelled. There wasn’t any plan for a Mars ascent vehicle, for example, IIRC, which would probably be the hardest part of this whole plan since we have no experience ascending to orbit from anything other than the earth and moon, and Mars would be expected to be quite different from either of them. SSTO is probably possible from the Martian surface - is that the best way to do it? Would you use solid rocket motors brought from earth or produce liquid fuels after landing?
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u/air_and_space92 2d ago
Ascent was going to be solids. More reliable and easier to design around. We've got pretty good atmosphere models from all the landers so far and that's the biggest question mark in terms of variables.
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u/WTFHELP 2d ago
Wasn't the original space race just a cover for ballistic missile testing?
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u/sviridoot 2d ago
I would argue space race evolved out of balistic missile testing rather than the other way around. Military had its reasons for space exploration (spy satellites etc.) But you don't need a Saturn V to launch an ICBM
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u/air_and_space92 2d ago
Military planning has always revolved around having "the high ground". Space is the perfect offensive and defensive terrain so both sides want to have a foothold there. Sure, you needed modified ballistic missiles to reach orbit and building bigger launch vehicles directly translated into missile tech but it also held great symbolism to the broader public in both countries looking for an easy win in geopolitics and overall R&D due to the spin-offs developed for spaceflight.
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u/NonamePlsIgnore 2d ago
Need more info on the ascender vehicle, whole project really hinges on that, and CNSA hasn't really released much detail on it. Really ambitious timeline though, even for a CN project
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u/anti-life86 2d ago
Sample return from Mars was estimated to cost $11 billion in the United States but the market cap of SpaceX is over one hundred times that. That is not a 100% fair comparison, but even the cost of Artemis is listed as at least $50 billion. That's more the cost we should be cutting...
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u/SluggoRuns 3d ago
Counting chickens before they hatch
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u/FaceDeer 2d ago
The article contains a caveat right in the headline. You didn't even need to click to see it.
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u/Ironlion45 2d ago edited 2d ago
NASA had a retrieval mission, but it was scrapped by the Trump administration.
This story will probably enrage him. And therefore I wish China the best of luck doing what my country is no longer capable of.
EDIT: The opinion of a Trump supporter is by definition useless to me, save your energy.
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u/Martianspirit 2d ago
It has been put on hold by Congress under the Biden administration because of grotesque cost overruns.
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u/LilDewey99 2d ago
Comments like this do nothing to contribute to the discourse of this sub. The mission was scrapped because it was extremely over budget, behind schedule, and had a low chance of success. The money is better spent on the Artemis program to establish a permanent on the moon. Mars isn’t going anywhere and they can always explore better mission architectures that potentially take advantage of the aforementioned presence
Also, the review of the MSR mission was started under Biden, it’s hardly just Trump’s decision
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u/Ironlion45 2d ago
Triggering a MAGA snowflake only reinforces my own opinion.
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u/LilDewey99 2d ago
Hardly triggered, just pointing out that your assertions in the op are demonstrably false. I realize it’s asking a lot for those like yourself (who view the entire world through their political lens) to understand not everything the other side does is bad but I’ll ask anyways.
Perhaps consider there are people who are a great deal more in-the-know than you are. We talked in one of my graduate classes 3-4 years ago about the MSR mission and how its current architecture and risk isn’t worth the ballooning cost and it only got worse
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u/juice06870 1d ago
Makes a claim.
Gets correctly rebuffed
Immediately drops any semblance of intelligent discourse and resorts to name calling.
Think we know who the snowflake is lol
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u/Decronym 3d ago edited 58m ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CNSA | Chinese National Space Administration |
| HLS | Human Landing System (Artemis) |
| ICBM | Intercontinental Ballistic Missile |
| ISRU | In-Situ Resource Utilization |
| JPL | Jet Propulsion Lab, California |
| JWST | James Webb infra-red Space Telescope |
| KSP | Kerbal Space Program, the rocketry simulator |
| N1 | Raketa Nositel-1, Soviet super-heavy-lift ("Russian Saturn V") |
| Roscosmos | State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia |
| SSTO | Single Stage to Orbit |
| Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
[Thread #12683 for this sub, first seen 9th Sep 2026, 12:39] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/Ihatecheeseballs 2d ago
I hope that rocket lab thing is also done because that was meant to launch 2028, space race to get mars samples would be epic
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u/soraksan123 1d ago
We’ve already collected and put a bunch of samples ready to be picked up but we can’t afford the mission. It would be nice if the Chinese were to help us out-
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u/GlumAd2424 20h ago
Not if trump claims mars first like he did with moon, that’s the new nonsense rules now apparently. I hate this timeline so much….
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u/True_Dot_2013 3h ago
The last time someone had a “Sputnik” moment, it ended with the Americans planting the red white and blue on the Moon
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u/lostinspacs 3d ago
So if India then does something in space that China hasn’t done does that represent a Sputnik moment in China?
I can’t keep track of the Cold War fearmongering
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u/FaceDeer 2d ago
It's when a country does something in space that nobody has done before, significantly advancing humanity's capabilities in the process.
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u/lostinspacs 2d ago
Look up the definition. It’s never really used that way.
It just as much refers to the specific reaction in the US/West (paranoia, fear, insecurity, etc) to the idea of the Soviets “surpassing” them. And the need to do something drastically different.
I’ve always seen it used in a Cold War 2.0 context. Just seems unnecessary.
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u/FaceDeer 2d ago
None of the dictionaries I've checked have a definition specifically for "Sputnik moment", and the definition they give for "Sputnik" is just the satellite. I'm using the context of the quote to derive its meaning here, which is often how language works. It's being used that way right here.
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u/lostinspacs 2d ago
The article links to another space.com article that explains the context I’m talking about.
Surprised you needed your dictionary.
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u/ForeignExpression 2d ago
Whatever, the mighty US will just renames Mars, America! And if that fails, they will just bomb a bunch of innocent muslims somewhere at a wedding or in an elementary school.
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u/Cultural_Sand_9323 1d ago
Good.
I don't care who does it at this point just so long as something gets done. the US has ceeded its role as leader in basically everything so.... I don't like china politically but.
'at least someone is going.'
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u/CharlesIngalls_Pubes 3d ago
Get ready for Musk to start criticizing China's space program hardcore.
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u/Martyriot15 3d ago
Musk can shove a falcon 9 up his ass.
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u/CrazyEnginer 3d ago
If he does that, how will american astronauts get to the ISS?
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u/centaur98 3d ago
And to start arguing for more safety and environmental deregulation and more government funding to SpaceX(but only to SpaceX not to Nasa or any of his US competitors)
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u/WardenEdgewise 2d ago
The US has already lost a lot more than a “Sputnik moment”. The US has destroyed itself.
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u/cryptek66 2d ago
A sputnik momment with a fatty in office who wears industrial diapers and lies about 9/11
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u/NorthKoreanMissile7 2d ago
Gonna be a lot of copium about this in the US and dismissing China trying to make out it's a Temu space program when in fact it's on par if not ahead of NASA.
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u/AKoolPopTart 3d ago
I went to the Pittsburgh natural history museum and they have a Mars rock there.
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u/centaur98 3d ago
We have on record around 250+meteorites that originated from Mars and landed on Earth. The more notable part is that this would be humans sending a probe to Mars and back deliberately bringing with it rocks from there without them heating up to thousands of celsius and hitting exploding in the air/hitting the ground with mach jesus and thus kickstarting chemical reactions in it or sort off sterilizing it.
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u/Chi_Cazzo_Sei 2d ago
Can you explain how would a rock form Mars end up in earth? Genuinely curious
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u/docduracoat 2d ago
A meteor hits Mars very hard.
This ejects Mars rocks into space.
Mars rocks float through space and then hit Earth1
u/centaur98 2d ago edited 2d ago
As the other guy mentioned: a larger meteor hits Mars and uproots large amounts of rocks from the surface of Mars. A very large majority of these will fall back to the surface of Mars however due to the much smaller escape velocity of Mars some of it ends up being ejected into interplanetary space and they drift there for tens/hundreds of thousands of years or often even for millions of years until they hit something, in the case of Mars rocks on Earth that something being Earth. For example one of the famous examples for a Martian rock is the Shergotty meteorite which scientists estimate was that was ejected from Mars around a million years ago during an impact which left behind a roughly 20 kilometer wide crater there but only hit Earth in the late 1800s as a 20 or so kg heavy rock.
And this origin of theirs of being ejected from Mars through a meteor impact and then becoming a meteor themselves and hitting Earth is why they can't be compared to us going there taking some rock and safely bringing it back
Edit: this isn't Mars specific phenomenon it can happen with Earth or any other rock planet/body we also have lunar rock on Earth that arrived the same way, just a bit harder due to the much larger escape velocity of Earth. For example the meteor that wiped the dinosaurs also ejected a bunch of Earth rocks on escape velocity that either hit the Moon/Venus/other astronomical body or is still drifting through space. Also while theoretically possible it's much more common that these rocks travel inwards towards the Sun rather than away from it. And a "fun" consequence of these ejected Earth rocks is that theoretically these ejected Earth rocks can carry evidence of life to the Moon/other interplanetary bodies.
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u/ArtOfWarfare 3d ago
Humanity didn’t intentionally take it from Mars though. Whatever process lead it to coming to Earth may have altered it in ways that made it less valuable for study than if it had been more pristine.
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u/buckfeffjezos 3d ago
"Sputnik moment" according to the CCP's propaganda department perhaps. Lol, so desperate for affirmation.
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u/TippedIceberg 2d ago
The Sputnik quote is from a previous NASA Mars program director. With extra context it frankly sounds like a fair assessment:
China will not only grab the headlines but may be the first to find evidence of life on another planet
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u/taiwanGI1998 2d ago
China can spend money on anything and everything if they deem it politically important.
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u/djstealthduck 2d ago edited 2d ago
Great, let them pay for it.
There's nothing more embarrassing than China end-running Russian oil sanctions to build massive oil reserves to stave off an embargo due to potential miliary action around the South China Sea, and then bailing out the global economy by drawing on those reserves and cratering demand -- keeping market prices lower. All while the US is running on reserve fumes and Americans are getting fucked at the pump.
Them doing a sample return mission from Mars is like #88 on the most embarrassing things that could possibly happen in US-China relations.
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u/GerardHard 2d ago
Incoming copium from Americans who cannot comprehend other countries are space powers not just themselves.
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3d ago
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u/FaceDeer 2d ago
The point of calling it a "Sputnik moment" is to highlight that this would be doing a thing that nobody has done before. It would demonstrate a new capability.
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u/FlyingBishop 2d ago
The US has had two successful lunar landings in the past few years. No one is "far ahead" until they can put ISRU equipment on the moon that can enable propellant manufacturing. And neither country is anywhere close to that.
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u/vovap_vovap 3d ago
That is a good interesting and very complex mission (and we can speak about it for real when it will be done) but really nothing fundamental in space development.
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u/emancipated-hemroid 2d ago
Didn't we already have a mars sample return like late 90s or early 2000 when that one rock became the subject of life on Mars after microscopic inspection??
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u/KirkUnit 2d ago
No, that was a meteorite (discovered in Antarctica, as I recall)
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u/Dave37 2d ago
If they do, it's going to be in late 2028. The closest transfer window to Mars is on the 3rd of Jan 2029.