Will China return Mars samples to Earth before the US does?

[Admin]

China has moved up its timeline for bringing Mars samples to Earth, aiming to do so as early as 2028 — long before the U.S. is slated to achieve this same ambitious goal.

Will China return Mars samples to Earth before the US does? : Read more

 

[Rob77]

Competition is good, its a wake up call to NASA to get off their butts, so to speak.
I sense another space race coming, but now it will be first to Mars.

 

[Classical Motion]

We need to find something valuable and continuous in or from space. Better yet something from the moon. Some kind of material that we can’t find here on earth. Perhaps a crystal structure with electronic advantage that can only form in low gravity. Or a new porous material. Something, useful and expensive. Wanted. Needed. OR….. a mysterious radio signal that can only be heard on the far side of the moon.

If there was, we would have several private space companies, all looking for an edge over the other.

And rotating space stations by now.

Find a money reason to go. Then all want to go.

The guy that finds this thing is the founder of a real space age. Man needs a reward. Knowledge is nice, but not enough. Man searches reward way before nice. Not much competition for nice.

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

"Taxpayers both in the U.S. and Europe should be righteously angry at Congress, NASA and ESA for not appropriating the funds and designing the projects necessary to hold to the original return date," Hubbard concluded.

Hear, hear!

But even if a sample grab partly mirrors the collected martian meteorites we have, it and its undisturbed nature will add to the whole.

FWIW, recent science on martian meteorites: Despite some of the rock ages they are fairly young ejecta from an estimate 5 impacts on Mars so samples a small diversity. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn2378
That they are young ejecta is consistent with recent science on asteroid meteorites, they too are sampling a small diversity at recent times since the fragment population is eroded relatively quickly.

Here we show that approximately 70% of meteorites originate from three recent break-ups of D > 30 km asteroids that occurred 5.8, 7.6 and less than about 40 Myr ago.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08006-7

Find a money reason to go. Then all want to go.

SpaceX and Blue Origin is betting on money being provided by a smaller fraction of colonists (Mars respectively O'Neill habitats), which will reproduce and grow. Assuming they can make space launches cheap enough.

However, there is no Earth analog for such colonization, it was driven by looting indigenous resources. Antarctica science and tourist habitats is the closest analog and its population not growing at colony speeds.

We'll have to wait and see what happens.