China Is Getting Closer to Surpassing NASA With Its Own Mars Mission. It Just Invited Other Countries to Join

Since arriving on Mars in 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover has been depositing Martian rock and regolith cores in airtight tubes scattered across the planet for future collection. Mars Sample Return is a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to retrieve and return these 38 tubes to Earth.

Last year, with the mission expected to be delayed until 2039 and its budget estimated between $7.7 billion and $11 billion, NASA effectively canceled it to control cost overruns. The agency considered alternative proposals and, in early 2025, postponed its decision for a year to choose between two options: an in-house architecture from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory or a commercial spacecraft from private industry.

China takes the lead. With Mars Sample Return on hold, China has a strong chance of becoming the first country to return Martian soil samples. Its Tianwen-3 mission is scheduled to launch in 2028, following the Tianwen-2 launch earlier this year to a near-Earth asteroid as a technological proof of concept.

Tianwen-3 is a simpler mission than Mars Sample Return because it will collect samples from the landing site rather than rock cores selected at various locations by Perseverance. However, its goal is the same as NASA’s: to analyze samples on Earth for organics and potential “biosignatures”—signs of past life.

Tianwen-3 opens to other countries. China’s space agency recently announced that its sample retrieval mission will be open to international cooperation. Scientists and space agencies worldwide have until June 30 to propose experiments or scientific instruments for inclusion in the Chinese mission.

Tianwen-3 will carry 33 pounds of foreign instruments on the spacecraft returning to Earth with the samples and another 11 pounds on the orbiter that will remain around Mars. ESA, already involved in the Mars Sample Return mission, may propose an experiment, potentially allowing it to surpass NASA in Martian exploration.

More from Xataka On

Curiosity Continues to Send Videos From Mars Back to Earth. Its Latest One Reveals Something Unusual About the Planet’s Clouds

Billionaires to the rescue. Meanwhile, in the U.S., SpaceX and Blue Origin have proposed using their lunar mission spacecraft—Starship and Blue Moon—to return Mars samples.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ companies have won numerous public contracts, but a third billionaire, Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck, has proposed a more straightforward solution. His $4 billion plan uses simple technology to return samples by 2031, the same year China’s Tianwen-3 would return to Earth.

Rocket Lab’s architecture. The mission involves three launches:

1. The Mars Telecommunications Orbiter will facilitate communication between Mars and Earth.
2. The Sample Retrieval Lander will collect samples using the same supersonic hovercraft and parachutes used by Mars rovers.
3. The Mars Ascent Vehicle, a single-stage rocket powered by Rocket Lab’s Electron Rutherford engines, will transport samples to Martian orbit.

The Earth Return Orbiter will then collect the samples and return them to Earth, using similar engines.

The three goals of the space race. Regardless of NASA’s decision, China aims to leverage delays in Mars Sample Return to claim the symbolic victory of returning the first samples, as it did with the Chang’e-6 mission, which retrieved the first samples from the Moon’s far side.

Beyond Mars, two other major objectives define the space race. The U.S. pledged to land the first woman on the Moon with Artemis III, originally scheduled for 2027. However, delays and cost overruns with the Space Launch System rocket and Starship have cast uncertainty over the entire Artemis program. Meanwhile, China aims to reach the Moon by 2030. After that, both nations will race to send the first humans to Mars.

Image | NASA

Related | Scientists Thought They Knew Why Mars Was Red. New Research Changes Everything