A consequential debate that has been simmering behind closed doors at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, must soon come to a head. It concerns the selection of the next spacecraft the agency will fly to Mars, and it could set the tone for the next decade of exploration of the red planet.
What everyone agrees on is that NASA needs a new spacecraft capable of relaying communications from Mars to Earth. This issue has become especially acute with the recent loss of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. NASA’s best communications relay remains the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has now been there for 20 years.
Congress cared enough about this issue to add $700 million in funding for a “Mars Telecommunications Orbiter” in the supplemental funding for NASA provided by the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the US Congress last year.
That’s a lot of money purely for a telecom orbiter
However, this legislation, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, raised a couple of key questions. The first is the specific wording of the bill, authored by a key Cruz staff member, Maddie Davis. It specified that the orbiter must be selected from among US companies that “received funding from the Administration in fiscal year 2024 or 2025 for commercial design studies for Mars Sample Return; and proposed a separate, independently launched Mars telecommunication orbiter supporting an end-to-end Mars sample return mission.”
The reference to “commercial design studies” referred to companies that proposed faster and more affordable missions to return samples from Mars, selected in 2024. Several observers told Ars the language included here appeared designed to favor Rocket Lab and its proposal for a telecommunications orbiter.
The other curious thing about the Cruz language is that it specified $700 million for the spacecraft and its launch, which seems like overkill.