PS — Again, for the senior citizens among us. Does anybody else recall Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad, Jr. and Alan L. Bean walking over to the Surveyor 3 lunar lander and clipping off some samples to carry back to earth?

I am Gen X, so Apollo was all before my time. But yes, I think Apollo 12’s visit to Surveyor 3 is one of the real highlights of the program — the only time that humans have actually “caught up” with one of our space probes in deep space — and I am certainly far from the only person who thinks so. Whenever I go down to the National Air & Space Museum on the Mall, I always marvel at the vidicon camera that Pete and Al removed from Surveyor, just thinking about the journey that camera has had, and how improbable the whole venture of bringing it back to Earth was.

Obviously it was also a credit to Pete Conrad’s ability to conduct a precision landing; the whole decision process to target Surveyor 3 caused one heck of a food fight at NASA (two site selection boards were unanimously opposed to it!), because of the doubts that it was possible to land close enough to the probe to make an EVA to it possible. Pete proved ’em wrong! Though all the regolith that got blasted all over Surveyor from the landing (163 meters away!) should have been a stronger hint to us of the dangers of regolith plumes, an issue that SpaceX and Blue Origin are now grappling with…

The question then becomes how do you go about getting the necessary field samples to determine what levels of PP are justified at these locations. And where and how is the analysis best done? How about either a manned or a fully automated lab orbiting Mars? (Once again, it seems like some kind of a Mars quarantine with an orbiting station and automated probes / rovers was a standard trope of 1950s science fiction. Perhaps not a bad idea even today.)

https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/space/voyage-to-mars-myth-or-reality/

Which begs the larger — and as yet unanswered question — of whether even Arcadia Planitia might harbor some form of past or present indigenous life. That is, absent some kind of prior determination, how do we know that it is prudent to land *anywhere* on Mars?

With Mr. Musk’s accelerated timeline for sending human beings to Mars, finding unequivocal evidence of life (or not) on this world would seem to be of primary importance in terms of making logical decisions about establishing a human presence there, yet the Never A Straight Answer agency keeps on telling us that an up to date, new technology version of the Viking missions is “impossible”* and that they can only look for “signs of life” (as at Jezero Crater) but yet not for life itself.

*Or that looking for life can only be done on a “step by step” (drip, drip, drip,) fashion, and the Viking approach was fundamentally flawed.

Perhaps SpaceX can design and deliver a “New Viking” probe to Mars to check this out. God knows, if we wait for NASA to do this, it would probably be a decade or so *after* a Starship has already landed somewhere.

If Elon Musk is at all serious about going to Mars — and there is every indication that he is, and will — then what on earth (or Mars) is the “need” for an automated sample return?

I think the answer you will get is: Planetary Protection.

At some point, NASA is bound to adjust down the PP status for much of Mars. But I doubt that Jezero Crater ever gets moved off Category IVb status. And it is not going to be possible to sterilize a Starship to Cat IVb levels, let alone one with humans on board.

But certainly, SpaceX could do sample collection at whatever site they do end up going to — Arcadia Planitia, or wherever.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/surveyor-3/

Now *that,* boys and girls, was a “sample return mission” back when NASA was the real deal, and people could still think clearly.

If Elon Musk is at all serious about going to Mars — and there is every indication that he is, and will — then what on earth (or Mars) is the “need” for an automated sample return? Soon enough, there will be people there to do the job in situ.

Meanwhile, if this is so urgent, GerogeC has it right. If we are looking for signs of life (or whatever) on Mars, then just send a better equipped automated lab there to do the job. Those of us who are old enough remember the Viking missions, but — now — the Never A Straight Answer Agency seems to believe that we can *only* detect signs of biology (or, again, whatever it is that they claim that they are looking for in these samples) in a lab here on earth. (What kind of lab, BTW, could Superheavy-Starship, New Glenn, or even the SLS, send to Mars to do the job, and at what fraction of the cost of the current sample return mission?)

Frankly, the Mars sample return concept makes SLS / Apollo look rational and fiscally sound by comparison, even if there were an actual “need” for such a thing. In passing, I wonder what Mr. Musk thinks about this in the context of DOGE.

A significant take-away from the November election is that a lot of people are sick and tired (to put it mildly) of being lied to and gaslighted by “authorities” such as the nice folks who presently run NASA, and killing the entire Mars Sample Return boondoggle would make a fine first shot across their bow. Robert is right; rethink EVERYTHING and then begin making some rational, reality-based decisions about what is is that we are actually trying to do.

Given how it wastes such a large proportion of what it does get, NASA will never have a “good” budget in the sense of getting as much as it would like. The Rube Goldbergian farce that has been – and continues to be – MSR is just one more example. One can excuse at least some of the SLS-Orion dumpster fire as it was forced on NASA by Congress. But MSR is all NASA’s and it ain’t pretty.

AO1,

I’m going to go way out on a limb here and guess that the basis of “fling it into the air” was that there was no way to add an armored vertical box launcher onto the already substantial mass budget for the MSR retrieval rover.

SpaceX demonstrating that you can have your KISS and Neet-o!, too.

Sometime I think these people in NASA contracts operate on the “wouldn’t it be cool” vs. KISS.