According to Gramling, the goal of re-evaluating the architecture of the program to send soil samples from Mars to Earth is to minimize costs and delays in the project schedule. To do this, NASA approached leading US space companies and received reports on 12 studies.
Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Rocket Lab, and SpaceX, as well as JPL and NASA’s internal team, also presented their projects. These companies and organizational divisions have the most radical mission change proposals: “end-to-end mission architectures”; but the SpaceNews portal did not explain what it was.
Other participants, including Aerojet Rocketdyne, Northrop Grumman, Whittinghill Aerospace, NASA Marshall and APL/Wallops, are proposing reducing the size and weight of the launch vehicle that would carry soil samples from Mars to near-Mars orbit.
Source: Ferra
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