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DeepSpace: Europe reveals Mars sample return spacecraft as SpaceX builds Starships

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7 years ago

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The European Space Agency (ESA) revealed a concept for a spacecraft that would work alongside NASA to return samples of Martian soil to Earth. (ESA)

Eric Ralph · May 28th, 2019

Welcome to the latest edition of DeepSpace! Each week, Teslarati space reporter Eric Ralph hand-crafts this newsletter to give you a breakdown of what’s happening in the space industry and what you need to know. To receive this newsletter (and others) directly and join our member-only Slack group, give us a 3-month trial for just $5.

On May 27th, the European Space Agency (ESA) published updated renders of a proposed spacecraft, called the Earth Return Orbiter (ERO). ERO would be the last of four critical elements of a joint NASA-ESA Mars sample return mission, meant to return perhaps 1-5 kg (2-11 lb) of Martian samples to scientists on Earth. In a best-case scenario, such a sample return is unlikely to happen before the tail-end of the 2020s and will probably slip well into the 2030s, barring any unexpected windfalls of funding or political support.

Enter SpaceX, a private American company developing Starship/Super Heavy – a massive, next-generation launch vehicle – with the goal of landing dozens of tons of cargo and just as many humans on Mars as few as 5-10 years from now. The radically different approaches of SpaceX and NASA/ESA are bound to produce equally different results, while both are expected to cost no less than $5B-$10B to be fully realized. What gives?

The high price of guaranteed success

  • As proposed, the Mars sample return mission will be an extraordinary technical challenge.
    • At a minimum, the current approach involves sending a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) rocket from Earth to Mars, landing the SSTO with extreme accuracy on the back of a new Mars lander, deploying a small rover to gather the sample container, loading that container onto the tiny rocket, launching said rocket into Mars orbit, grabbing the sample with large orbiter launched from Earth, and returning said sample to Earth where it will reenter the atmosphere and be safely recovered.
  • This downright Rube Golberg machine-esque architecture is nevertheless the best currently available with current mindsets and hardware. It’s also likely the only way NASA or ESA will independently acquire samples of Mars within the next few decades, barring radical changes to both the mindsets and technologies familiar and available to the deeply bureaucratic spaceflight agencies.
  • However, this is by no means an attempt to downplay the demonstrated expertise and capabilities of the space agencies and their go-to contractors. Both ESA and NASA have a decades-long heritage of spectacular achievements in robotic space exploration, reaching – however briefly, in some cases – almost every major planet and moon in the solar system.
    • The NASA-supported Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) remains a world-leading expert of both designing, building, and landing large, capable, and long-lived rovers/landers on the surface of Mars. JPL also has a track record of incredible success with space-based orbiters, including Cassini (Saturn), Magellan (Venus), Galileo (Jupiter), Voyager (most planets, now in interstellar space), Stardust (comet sample return), Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO, Mars orbiter) and more.
  • This success, however, can often come with extreme costs. NASA’s next Mars rover – essentially a modified copy of the Curiosity rover currently operating on Mars and a critical component of the proposed sample return – is likely to cost more than $2B, while Curiosity cost ~$2.5B. The Cassini Saturn orbiter cost around ~$3.5B for 15 years of scientific productivity. ESA’s Rosetta/Philae comet rendezvous cost at least $2B total. In the scheme of things, it would be hard to think of a more inspiring way to spend that money, but the fact remains that these missions are extremely expensive.

High risk, high reward

  • The price of missions like those above may, in fact, be close to their practical minimum, at least relative to the expectations of those footing the bill. However, it’s highly likely that similar results could be achieved on far tighter budgets, another way to say that far more returns could potentially be derived from the same investment.
    • The easiest way to explain this lies in the fact that the governments sponsoring and funding ESA and NASA have grown almost dysfunctionally risk-averse, to the extent that failure really isn’t an option in the modern era. Stakeholders – often elected representatives – expect success and often demand a guaranteed return on their support before choosing to fight for a given program’s funding.
    • As it turns out, an unwillingness to accept more than a minute amount of risk is not particularly compatible with affordably attempting to do things that are technically challenging and have often never been done before. That happens to be a great summary of spaceflight.
    • As risk aversion and the need for guaranteed success grew hand-in-hand, a sort of paradox formed. As politicians strove to ensure that space agency funding was efficiently used, space agencies became far more conservative (minimizing results and the potential for leaps forward) and the cost of complex, capable spacecraft grew dramatically.
    • The end result: spacecraft that are consistently reliable, high-performance, derivative, and terrifyingly expensive.
  • SpaceX is in many ways an anathema of the low-risk, medium-reward, high-cost approach that government space agencies and their dependent contractors have gravitated towards over the last 40-50 years. Instead, SpaceX accepts medium to high risk to attain great rewards at a cost that space agencies like NASA and ESA are often unable to accept as possible after decades of conservatism.
    • This is the main reason that it’s possible that NASA/ESA and SpaceX will both succeed in accomplishing goals at a dramatically disproportionate scale with roughly the same amount of funding.
    • If NASA/ESA bite the bullet and begin to seriously fund their triple-launch Mars Sample Return program, the missions will take a decade or longer and cost something like $5 million per gram of soil returned to Earth, but success will be all but guaranteed.
    • Both SpaceX’s Starship/Super Heavy and Mars colonization development programs run significant risks of hitting major obstacles, suffering catastrophic failures, and could even result in the death of crew members aboard the first attempted missions to Mars.
    • For that accepted risk, the rewards could be unfathomable and the costs revolutionary. SpaceX could very well beat the combined might of ESA and NASA to return large samples of Martian soil, rock, and water to Earth, all while launching ~100,000 kg into Martian orbit instead of the sample return’s ~10 kg.
    • In a best-case scenario, SpaceX could land the first uncrewed Starship on Mars as early as 2022 or 2024. Barring some unforeseen catastrophe or the company’s outright collapse, that first uncrewed Mars landing might happen as late as the early 2030s, around the same time as NASA and ESA’s ~10kg of Mars samples will likely be reentering Earth’s atmosphere.
  • Regardless of which approach succeeds first, space exploration fans and space scientists will have a spectacular amount of activity to be excited about over the next 10-20 years.
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– Eric
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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner

Elon Musk sat beside Trump as AI leaders signed a voluntary White House safety accord.

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1 hour ago

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September 29, 2026

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Elon Musk had the seat right next to President Donald Trump on Tuesday as the White House hosted the leaders of America’s biggest artificial intelligence companies for a lunch that ended with a voluntary industry accord on AI safety.

A seating chart Trump posted on Truth Social placed Musk at the president’s left in the East Room, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on his right, according to an Associated Press reporter. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also attended, along with Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

After the lunch, Trump told reporters outside the West Wing that the executives had signed “The White House Accord on Superintelligence: A Joint Commitment on Frontier SI Responsibilities.” Johnson described it as a voluntary statement of principles built on “robust internal controls and layers of internal and external review,” while Zuckerberg said company boards would independently review reports from outside auditors. Trump called the document “morally binding,” said he would name a new AI czar within days, and signed an executive order formally renaming artificial intelligence “super intelligence,” CNBC reported.

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Musk was not in the room for Tesla alone. Since SpaceX absorbed xAI, he runs the company behind Grok and one of the largest AI training operations anywhere. On September 25, he said another 220,000 Nvidia GB300 chips would come online at Colossus 2 within a week, with more expected in November and December.

SpaceX confirms third massive compute deal at Colossus data center

 

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Musk also used the trip to restate his energy ambitions. “SpaceX is aiming together with Tesla to do 200 gigawatts of solar production per year,” he said at an event in Washington. It is the same combined target he laid out that feeds directly into Terafab, the Tesla and SpaceX chip venture that will need enormous amounts of power.

The showing between Musk and Trump has come a long way, since the two had the very public split in mid 2025 after Musk opposed the “Big Beautiful Bill” and left DOGE. They reconciled at Charlie Kirk’s memorial that September, and Trump later called their relationship “good”. Since then, Musk has joined Trump’s China delegation in May and attended last week’s White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

For Tesla, that access to government official could pay dividends. As Teslarati noted in January, federal autonomy rules, NHTSA oversight and a single national standard for driverless vehicles all run through an administration Musk can more easily reach directly as Tesla works to scale Robotaxi and Cybercab beyond Texas.

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Elon Musk

Tesla Roadster’s new patent preps white-knuckle speeds, keeping it grounded

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15 hours ago

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September 29, 2026

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Credit: @BLKMDL3/Twitter

Ahead of its highly anticipated unveiling, Tesla’s upcoming Roadster received a new patent that aims to keep it grounded while enabling white-knuckle speeds.

The patent, which was granted on September 29, is titled “Electric Car Fan,” bluntly stating its design but not its purpose, which is further detailed in the text of the application. Interestingly, it comes two weeks before the Roadster event, which was delayed due to unfavorable weather on Thursday, which could cause issues, as Tesla revealed the event must be held outdoors.

The purpose is to solve a problem that is relatively unique to high-performance electric cars. Instant motor torque is useless if the tires cannot plant that force, and conventional wings and underbody tunnels generate downforce only when air is already rushing past the car. At launch, in slow corners, and under hard braking from modest speed, passive aerodynamic additions contribute essentially very little to downforce.

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Tesla’s filing says that its fans can produce the downforce needed, independent of vehicle velocity, then ease off so the same hardware does not pile on drag at highway speeds, an issue that can come from excessive body modifications.

The hardware outlined in the patent is a ducted-fan package that is placed into the rear of the vehicle. An underbody inlet between the rear wheels feeds a duct that rises to a wide outlet in the diffuser. In that outlet are four axial fans, which are divided by vertical strakes. They will pull air from under the floor and press the chassis onto the pavement.

The language in the patent claims it can cut drag rather than add to it while simultaneously increasing downforce.

Tesla Roadster event requires restricted airspace, and the FAA obliges

The fans run from the high-voltage battery and a vehicle control system, so output can be modulated rather than left on as a fixed penalty.

There are additional strengths that can come from this design, like extra tire load at low speed, which can contribute to even more face-melting acceleration rates, decrease stopping distance, and sharper turn-in before a wing has air to work with. Adjustable fan speed lets the car add grip only when needed, so it can be catered to the force of a turn or acceleration.

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These designs were previously used, and banned, in some competitive settings. The Brabham BT46B was banned in F1 competition for using a similar fan design and being labeled as too effective.

Tesla still lists the Roadster as having a sub-two-second 0-60 MPH time and a 250-plus-MPH top speed, and there are expectations for a SpaceX cold-gas thruster package that could not only increase acceleration but potentially cause the vehicle to hover.

It is important to note that a patent is not a production part, and packaging four fans in a rear diffuser, managing noise, and potential debris are all things Tesla must consider. With that being said, the patent being granted shows Tesla is designing the Roadster to go fast, but it is also attempting to use unique strategies to combat any issues it might have at those speeds.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla showrooms picked clean ahead of Q3 end as demand looks strong

Published

16 hours ago

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September 29, 2026

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Credit: @thaichiminh1907/X

Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) showrooms have been picked clean ahead of the end of the third quarter of the year, as demand looks to be strong and delivery estimates for new vehicles are pushed into late 2026 and early 2027.

Tesla appears to have sold out of many of its Model 3 and Model Y trim levels in the United States, as only the Model Y RWD and Model Y All-Wheel-Drive are available for delivery before the end of the year.

Additionally, many showrooms are either completely empty or void of all but just one demo unit within the buildings themselves in an effort to bolster what could be one of Tesla’s best quarters in vehicle deliveries in recent memory.

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Additionally, when I spoke to the guys at Tesla Mechanicsburg two weeks ago, when I returned the Model Y L, their third hauler of the week had just arrived, and every vehicle on it, along with every vehicle in their delivery lot, was accounted for and had a name attached to it for delivery.

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Tesla saw a 25 percent increase in deliveries in Q2 compared to the same quarter the year before. The vast majority of the 480,126 units it delivered, 467,762 vehicles to be exact, were the Model 3 and Model Y.

In Q3 2025, Tesla delivered 497,099 vehicles, once again a figure that was dominated by the company’s two mass-market vehicles. Analysts have unusually wide predictions for this quarter, likely because so many firms missed the Q2 delivery figure by such a substantial margin; Wall Street predicted 408,000 cars, while Tesla delivered 480,000.

Goldman Sachs has Tesla slotted for 435,000 deliveries in Q3, while JPMorgan said it anticipates 482,000. The median guess is about 449,000 deliveries for Q3.

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Interested in ordering a Tesla? Use my referral code for three free months of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) here.

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