By 
May 8th, 2025
The Red Planet as seen by Europe’s Mars Express.
Image credit: ESA/D. O’Donnell – CC BY-SA IGO
For over four years, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has been on the prowl within Jezero Crater. Since its touchdown in February 2021, the car-sized robot has been dutifully gathering rock samples across the exploratory landscape. Some of those sealed specimens may well contain signs of past life on the dusty, foreboding Red Planet.
NASA in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) have been steadfast in plotting out plans to send spacecraft to Mars and haul those Perseverance-plucked collectibles to Earth for close-up inspection in state-of-the-art facilities.
Image credit: NASA
But along with a 24.3% reduction to NASA’s top-line funding and slashing the space agency’s science budget by 47%, President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2026 proposed budget blueprint issued on May 2 by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has also taken the life out of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) venture.
This illustration shows an early concept for multiple robots that would team up to ferry to Earth samples collected from the Mars surface by NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
In a budgetary bombshell of a move, the NASA program has been cross-haired and cancelled, portrayed in the document as “grossly over budget and whose goals would be achieved by human missions to Mars.”
For details, go to my new Scientific American story – “NASA Spent Billions to Bring Rocks Back from Mars. Trump Wants to Leave Them There – After billions of dollars in spending and decades of planning, NASA may be forced to abandon precious samples of air, rock and soil on the Martian surface. Experts are furious” – go to:
Posted in Space News
Sadly, NASA and ESA have not been “steadfast.” Circa 2005, they decided that MSR was going to be all about bigger rovers, and they never acknowledged that getting off Mars needs a miniature launch vehicle beyond the state of the art for both space propulsion and small missiles. Starting in 1995, I reached out to multiple NASA centers and industry, wanting to connect with the community of people who were doing creative work for Mars ascent vehicles. I became friends with many propulsion people including those who built the sky crane Mars landing propulsion. However, there was no community for MAV development, then I had a career change in 2009. NASA funded my lab work from 2004 to 2006, and the managers I reported to wanted it to be a sure thing, not appreciating trial-and-error development of new technology. More recently I have reached out to the Mars scientists, and sadly they have no interest in learning about the rocket challenge, insisting that anonymous engineers will just go build a MAV. So from my perspective, MSR was cancelled around 2005 if not earlier, by the bias that all propulsive maneuvers for space science missions are within the realm of satellite propulsion technology.
Here is my explanation with lots of solid references (red words are links).
https://spacenews.com/missing-link-still-needed-to-save-mars-sample-return/