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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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Tesla FSD successfully completes full coast-to-coast drive with zero interventions

Tesla community members celebrated the milestone on X, and the feat earned praise from some of the electric vehicle maker’s executives.

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2 hours ago

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December 31, 2025

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Credit: Grok Imagine

A Tesla owner has successfully completed a full coast-to-coast drive across the United States on Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised. The trip was accomplished with zero interventions.

Tesla community members celebrated the milestone on X, and the feat earned praise from some of the electric vehicle maker’s executives. 

FSD Coast-to-Coast

The coast-to-coast feat was accomplished by Tesla owner Davis Moss, who drives a stealth gray Model 3 with AI4 hardware. Based on data from the FSD database and a community tracker, the last 10,638.8 miles Moss drove in his Model 3 were completed using FSD 100% of the time. His vehicle is equipped with FSD v14.2.1.25, which was installed 12 days ago.

As per Moss in a celebratory post on X, his Model 3 was able to complete a full coast-to-coast drive across the United States in 2 days and 20 hours. His trip started at the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles, CA, and it ended in Myrtle Beach, SC. Overall, his trip spanned 2,732.4 miles. 

“This was accomplished with Tesla FSD V14.2 with absolutely 0 disengagements of any kind even for all parking including at Tesla Superchargers,” Moss stated in his post. He also added in later comments that there were zero close calls during the trip.

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Tesla community celebrates 

The FSD milestone trip was widely lauded by members of the Tesla community, especially since a coast-to-coast drive with zero interventions has been cited by Elon Musk as a target since October 2016, when Autopilot 2.0 was unveiled. At the time, Musk initially estimated that a coast-to-coast drive across the United States should be possible by the end of 2017. Considering Moss’ feat in his Model 3, it appears that Elon Musk’s estimate was not impossible at all. It was just late.

Musk himself celebrated the milestone on X, and so did Tesla VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy, who wrote “World’s first fully autonomous coast-to-coast drive, done with Tesla self-driving v14. Congrats and thank you @DavidMoss!” in a post on X. The official Tesla North America account also celebrated the feat, writing “First Tesla to drive itself from coast to coast w/ FSD Supervised. 0 interventions, all FSD” on X.

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Elon Musk: Tesla Model Y is world’s best-selling car for 3rd year in a row

The Model Y has now established an impressive streak that would otherwise have been impossible before Tesla. 

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9 hours ago

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December 30, 2025

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Credit: Grok Imagine

Elon Musk has announced that the Tesla Model Y has become the world’s best-selling car by volume for the third consecutive year, capping 2025 with another dominant performance. 

The Model Y has now established an impressive streak that would otherwise have been impossible before Tesla. 

Three years in a row

Musk posted on X: “Tesla Model Y is now officially the world’s best-selling car for the third year in a row!” The CEO’s comment echoed an update that Tesla included in its 2025 recap, which highlighted, among other things, the Model Y’s incredible streak. 

The Model Y has held the title since 2023, outperforming traditional leaders like the Toyota RAV4 and Corolla thanks to its bang-for-the-buck nature and its stellar combination of practicality, performance, and tech. The Model Y is also lauded as one of the safest vehicles on the road, making it an ideal choice for families in key markets such as China. 

An impressive 2025

The Model Y’s sales feat in 2025 is especially impressive considering the introduction of the vehicle’s new variant. Tesla’s changeover to the new Model Y across its global factories resulted in sales being paused for some time in the first quarter. As per Tesla’s Q1 2025 vehicle delivery and production report, “the changeover of Model Y lines across all four of our factories led to the loss of several weeks of production in Q1.” 

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This suggests that the Model Y’s sales remained strong in 2025 to the point where it could still claim the title of the world’s best-selling vehicle by volume, even with its sales being throttled during the first quarter of the year. It would then be interesting to see just how far the Model Y can go in 2026, especially considering the rollout of new variants like the six-seat extended wheelbase Model Y L, the affordable Model Y Standard, and the top-tier Model Y Performance. 

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Tesla shares epic 2025 recap video, confirms start of Cybercab production

The cinematic montage, posted by the official Tesla account on X, celebrated the company’s progress in EVs, energy, and Robotaxi development.

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18 hours ago

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December 30, 2025

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla has released an epic year-in-review video for 2025, recapping some of its major achievements from refreshed models to autonomy breakthroughs and production ramps. 

The cinematic montage, posted by the official Tesla account on X, celebrated the company’s progress in EVs, energy, and Robotaxi development while looking ahead to an even bigger 2026.

Tesla’s 2025 highlights recap

Tesla has had a busy 2025, as highlighted in the recap video. The video opened with Elon Musk explaining the company’s pursuit of sustainable abundance. A number of milestones were then highlighted, such as the rollout of FSD v14, Optimus’ numerous demos, the opening of the Tesla Diner in Hollywood, LA, the completion of the world’s first autonomous car delivery, and the launch of the Robotaxi network in Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Tesla also highlighted several of its accomplishments over the year. As per the company, the Model Y was the year’s best-selling vehicle globally again, and Teslas became more affordable than ever thanks to the Model 3 and Model Y Standard. Other key models were also rolled out, such as the refreshed Model S and X, as well as the new Model Y, the new Model Y Performance, and the six-seat, extended wheelbase Model Y L. 

The Megablock was also unveiled during the year, and the Supercharger Network grew by 18%. Over 1 million Powerwalls were also installed during the year, and the Cybertruck became the first EV truck to get both an IIHS Top Safety Pick+ award and an NHTSA 5-Star safety rating. 

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Cybercab production confirmed

Interestingly enough, Tesla also confirmed in its 2025 recap video that the production of the Cybercab has started. This bodes well for the vehicle, as it could result in the vehicle really being mass-produced in the first half of 2026. Elon Musk confirmed during the 2025 Annual Shareholder Meeting that Cybercab production should earnestly start around April 2026. 

Musk has also noted that the Cybercab will be Tesla’s highest-volume vehicle yet, with the company aiming for an annual production rate of about 2 million units. “If you’ve seen the design of the Cybercab line, it doesn’t look like a normal car manufacturing line,” Musk said earlier this year. “It looks like a really high-speed consumer electronics line. In fact, the line will move so fast that actually people can’t even get close to it.”

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