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In February 2012, the future of NASA’s Mars Exploration program looked bleak. The Obama administration’s 2013 budget request slashed its funding by 38.5%, canceling two planned missions to the red planet in the process.
Nine years and $2.7 billion later, America’s top scientists guided a 2,000-pound nuclear-powered rover known as Perseverance 300 million miles through space and safely into Mars’ Jezero Crater. The rover’s primary mission? To search for signs of ancient microbial life and collect samples that could one day be returned to Earth.
For that, Perseverance came well prepared: its 7-foot-long robotic arm is equipped with a drill to collect rock and soil samples, and it can even use a laser to vaporize rock from 20 feet away to determine its composition. Best of all, it’s designed to seal away samples in titanium tubes and store them at a drop-off site to be taken back to Earth for detailed analysis.
But we won’t be retrieving Perseverance’s samples. At least, not anytime soon.
A compromise spending bill enacted by Congress in January 2026 failed to save the Mars Sample Return program. The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget request called it “grossly overbudget" and secondary to “returning to the moon before China and putting a man on Mars”.
From that description, you might think Perseverance’s time on Mars was uneventful — but in 2024, Perseverance stumbled upon what NASA called the closest it has ever come to discovering life on Mars.
A sample core named “Sapphire Canyon” Perseverance collected from the Cheyava Falls outcropping revealed irregular, leopard-like spots of minerals buried within the rock. The composition of the minerals seemed consistent with chemical processes associated with microbial life on Earth, but non-biological explanations can't be ruled out yet.
An international team of scientists took a closer look at the spots and classified them as “potential biosignatures” — possible evidence of microbial life on Mars that will require far more detailed study on Earth to confirm.
The answer to whether humanity has discovered its first extraterrestrial life might be sitting in a titanium tube in Jezero Crater. The implications are astounding — the discovery of life on other planets, let alone one in our very own solar system, might imply that life in the universe is a common occurrence. Even stranger is the possibility that life didn’t originate on Earth at all but instead hitched a ride here from somewhere else.
But these discoveries are only possible if we can retrieve the samples, and the United States seems to lack the perseverance for it. Unfortunately for NASA, the Chinese National Space Administration seems to have more than enough.
The CNSA landed a rover of its own, Zhurong, on Mars in 2021. Now it intends to go a step further. Last April, it confirmed a sample recovery mission called Tianwen-3 would launch sometime in 2028 and return Martian samples to Earth as early as 2031.
Of course, a discovery made by Chinese scientists doesn’t become worthless to American ones just because another nation beat them to the scientific punch. Look no further than Tianwen-3 itself, which will carry a key instrument provided by the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics.
But at the same time, the Mars Sample Return program is about more than just getting an answer. Just like landing a man on the moon, scientific competition between countries to do what’s never been done before drives the cutting edge of innovation.
After all, it was the Soviet launch of Sputnik-1, the first ever artificial satellite, which helped drive Congress to create NASA in 1958. The ominously beeping sphere was proof of a key technological capability of the Soviet Union and wasn't actually equipped with any scientific instruments.
The ensuing space race forced us to develop the rockets, computers, communications systems and scientific foundations we rely on in a host of modern industries. Eleven years after NASA’s creation, American astronauts walked on the moon.
Competition drives science, for better or for worse, and you can’t always share scientific capability like you can share scientific knowledge. By dropping out of the race to return Martian samples to Earth, the United States risks losing not only the opportunity to answer the questions raised by Perseverance’s samples, but the chance to develop the technological capabilities required to bring them home.
A Martian sample return program isn’t the only research area where China is looking to contest America’s dominance — by one key measure, the Chinese government now outspends the U.S. in research and development funding. At the same time, thousands of U.S. research grants have been canceled or suspended by the Trump administration since the start of 2025.
The United States spent decades setting up Perseverance’s unlikely journey to Jezero Crater. We designed a rover that could traverse the surface of an alien planet — a robot the size of a small car that could survive radiation, dust and extreme cold. We equipped it with the instrumentation to analyze Martian rock and report its findings to Earth from millions of miles away. We even got lucky enough to drill into something worth bringing back.
Getting it back is the hard part, and some don’t think the challenge will be worthwhile.
But could the average American, in 1958, have imagined the kind of technology that would eventually be born from NASA's space race? Or that in a little over a decade, we could land a man safely on the moon? It seems easy to underestimate how much we can learn when we try to do something that's never been done before.
Returning Perseverance's Mars samples represents a new frontier begging to be investigated. What we could find might help us understand our place in the universe — the beginning of the answer to the question: "Are we really alone?" We've come too far to give up on the brink of finding out.
It will be difficult, complicated and expensive. NASA even concluded in 2024 that the sample return program needed sizeable reworking for budgetary and timeline concerns. But scientific capability is built by finding ways to solve the hardest problems, not abandon them. If the United States can’t find a way to return the samples, someone else will.
Perseverance has already done its part. Somewhere in Jezero Crater, a titanium sample tube might contain one of the universe’s most well-protected secrets. For now, it's waiting for someone to go get it.
Spencer Schaberg (he/him) is a junior studying microbiology.
