Hello, and welcome to the space policy edition of Planetary Radio.

I'm Casey Dreyer, Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society, welcoming you to yet another month to talk about the, at this time, right, uninteresting and sedate area of space policy and politics, particularly that affecting NASA.

This month, of course, I'm going to be talking about Mars.

And maybe not the Mars you're thinking of, but the samples that are currently sitting there

on the surface and actively being collected by the Perseverance rover.

The idea that we need to bring those samples back is the culmination of more than 50 years of NASA ambition and scientist ambition to study pieces of Mars in a pristine state to help understand not just the history of Mars, but helping to set the chronological history of the entire solar system.

There's also the little fact, of course, that maybe we'll find evidence of life or past life in some of the samples that they're

collecting right now. It is a big deal. The project, of course, for those of you who've been

following along, has hit some snags. It's been more than two years since NASA paused most of its work on

Mars sample return after an independent review project found that Mars sample return was

functionally spiraling out of control. It was originally intended to be a lean project costing

no more than $3 billion or so, returning samples by 2026.

By the time the team looked at it in 2023, cost estimates had spiraled to nearly $11 billion,

which is a bad place to be before you actually commit to your design and start building everything.

NASA has spent an unusually long amount of time,

let's say, going through multiple rounds of program reviews, reconsiderations, and finally,

right in the final weeks of the Biden administration, Senator and Administrator Bill Nelson

made the announcement about what the path forward from our sample

return was going to be. That announcement was to pursue two further studies with a decision

to be made in 2026. These two studies are somewhat different than what had been proposed

before, but still had large parts of consistency.

They would both still use the European provided Mars Earth Return Orbiter, and they would still

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