Mars Sample Return runs out of money
Ten sealed tubes have lain in the dust at Three Forks since January 2023, waiting for a retrieval mission that Congress declined to fund three years later.
Between 21 December 2022 and 28 January 2023 Perseverance laid ten sealed titanium tubes five to fifteen metres apart at Three Forks, a flat patch of Jezero crater, each position mapped for later recovery: the backup half of a paired collection, the primary set staying aboard the rover. Retrieval needed a NASA lander, a small rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle, and a European Earth Return Orbiter to catch the canister in Mars orbit and bring it home.
An independent review board under Orlando Figueroa reported in September 2023 that the programme could cost 11 billion dollars against a plan built around seven, with the earliest feasible launches in 2030, the architecture over-constrained, the management tangled, and the published 2027 and 2028 launch dates near-impossible.
In April 2024 Administrator Bill Nelson stopped the work and asked NASA centres and industry for cheaper designs. In January 2025 NASA narrowed the field to two: a sky crane about twenty percent bigger than Perseverance's at 6.6 to 7.7 billion dollars, or a commercially built heavy lander at 5.8 to 7.1 billion, both aiming at samples on Earth in 2035–2039, with the design to be confirmed in the second half of 2026.
The White House's fiscal 2026 request, in May 2025, proposed cancelling Mars Sample Return as financially unstable, since human missions would do the job. Congress rejected most of the administration's NASA cuts but agreed with this one. The appropriations agreement of early January 2026 did not support the existing programme: the House passed the package on 8 January, it became law on 23 January, and about $110 million was left in a generic "Mars future missions" line, nothing for retrieval. NASA closed the Mars Sample Return Program Office.
ESA held a €491 million Airbus contract for the Earth Return Orbiter. At its ministerial council in Bremen in November 2025 it proposed converting the orbiter into an atmospheric and relay mission launching around 2032; in March 2026 member states asked instead for outright cancellation, with the electric propulsion named as one candidate for reuse.
Perseverance has kept drilling: thirty of its thirty-eight tubes are filled, twenty-eight of them sealed, and its plutonium power will fade over the next decade or so. A lander arriving while the rover can still drive can be handed the tubes; after that someone has to collect them off the ground at Three Forks. As of September 2026 no mission is funded to do either.