The commercial case for Marsby Jeff Foust
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| Companies made clear they were very interested in pursuing whatever opportunities CMPS offered for Mars missions, in many cases leveraging what they have done elsewhere. |
Notably absent from the announcement were any details on the cost of the mission or the schedule. While SpaceX had talked as recently as May about sending Starships to Mars in the next launch window in late 2026 (see “Starship setbacks and strategies”, The Space Review, June 9, 2025), SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the day before the ASI announcement there was now only a “slight chance” of sending Starships to Mars then. He said the first uncrewed launches were more likely at the following window at the end of 2028.
While Starship Mars missions might be slipping, what hasn’t been is interest in Mars missions that are commercial in some way. Instead of being developed and run by space agencies, these missions would be commercially operated with customers—like space agencies—buying services. It’s an approach that has worked for crew and cargo transportation to the International Space Station and, more recently, lunar lander missions. Will it work for Mars?
NASA is betting it can. Last year the agency commissioned a dozen studies from industry on how they could provide services such as payload delivery, communications, and imaging. Agency officials said late last year that the concepts studied by the companies looked promising and merited further study (see “The future of robotic Mars exploration”, The Space Review, December 16, 2024).
When NASA released its detailed fiscal year 2026 budget proposal in late May, it included $200 million for a new effort called Commercial Mars Payload Services (CMPS). That would be modeled on the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program for lunar lander missions, but the budget provided few other details about how CMPS would work other than to say that “near-term efforts will focus funding on supporting the maturation of commercial robotic Mars lander concepts.”
The initiative is so new that NASA hasn’t even figured out how to pronounce CMPS, unlike CLPS, which soon after its introduction was universally pronounced “clips.” “Somebody called it ‘compass’ the other day and I was like, ‘that’s a stretch,’” said Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, during a panel discussion at the AIAA ASCEND conference last month. She, and others, have settled on “sea-mips” for now.
The initial planning for CMPS, she said, involves what the cadence of missions will be and the types of missions, such as orbiters or landers, “so that we can start putting together the science program behind it.”
At both the ASCEND panel and another at last week’s Small Satellite Conference, companies made clear they were very interested in pursuing whatever opportunities CMPS offered for Mars missions, in many cases leveraging what they have done elsewhere.
An example is Albedo, a startup developing a constellation of very low Earth orbit satellites that can provide very high resolution imagery. The company’s first satellite, Clarity-1, launched earlier this year and is nearing the end of its commissioning process, said company CTO AyJay Lasater at Smallsat.
The company received one of the NASA studies last year to show how such satellites could work at Mars. In some respects, it would be easier to operate the satellites at Mars, with less atmospheric drag at low altitudes that satellites will need to compensate for.
He said the business models for the satellites would be similar. “We would look to follow a very similar level of pricing for a Mars commercial variant, where you follow a dollar-per-square-kilometer method,” he said.
| “Somewhere between 70 and 80% of what we’ve proven and learned to get to the Moon is directly applicable to Mars,” Firefly’s Ferring said, “and to go solve that extra 20 to 30% is a thing to do, but it’s not impossible.” |
The price would depend on the resolution requested: a chart he displayed included a table of prices that ranged from $120 per square kilometer for imagery at resolutions of more than 50 centimeters, increasing to $3,000 per square kilometer for imagery at resolutions sharper than 20 centimeters. The satellites, he said, could take images as sharp as 11 centimeters per pixel.
Firefly Aerospace, whose Blue Ghost spacecraft successfully landed on the Moon in March, has explored how it could be adapted for Mars missions. “If you look at Blue Ghost, it’s really well sized to be a converted to a Mars mission,” Shea Ferring, CTO of Firefly, at the Smallsat panel. The lander could fit into the same sized aeroshell as used on the Perseverance rover, he noted, simplifying landing.
“Somewhere between 70 and 80% of what we’ve proven and learned to get to the Moon is directly applicable to Mars,” he said, “and to go solve that extra 20 to 30% is a thing to do, but it’s not impossible, and I think you can do it with the same mindset and same model that the CLPS program has operated to, maybe with some tweaks.”
One of those tweaks may be dealing with the differences between going to the Moon versus Mars. “In CLPS, there are some landing windows so there are some constraints, but it’s not 26 months,” or the gap between Mars launch windows, Fox noted. “So by that token, CMPS will be a little different.”
CLPS current awards two task orders a year with the same cadence of missions. That means there are a regular series of opportunities for companies to win missions. Providing a similar stream of opportunities will be more difficult for Mars with the longer gap between launch windows.
“How do you take advantage of every single Mars window to accumulate capability but also make sure that you have the industrial capabilities that can survive from window to window because they’re doing other things?” said Nick Cummings, senior director of civil and national security space at SpaceX, at the ASCEND panel.
One solution is to do long-term procurements or block buys, said Tommy Sanford, director of civil sales at Blue Origin, said at the Smallsat panel. “CLPS did it as one-offs,” or competing missions one at a time, he said. Block buys are something companies have recommended NASA pursue for CLPS in the next round of contracts. “That way you can balance your risk portfolio better.”
A more central challenge, though, is the C in CMPS: commercial. Who else beyond NASA would be a customer for what ostensibly is supposed to be a commercial service?
Both NASA and industry acknowledge that there are few such customers, at least for the foreseeable future. “I don’t see, personally, a huge commercial interest, at least in the near future, of going to Mars unless you’re supporting NASA or ESA” or other national space agencies, Fox said.
“I’ve been pretty skeptical of non-government customers in those domains,” said Richard French, vice president of business development and strategy in Rocket Lab’s space systems division, referring to both lunar and Martian missions, at Smallsat.
He and others, though, said there is value in the commercial model for Mars missions. “The commercial piece is less important to focus on than the management strategies and all the great lessons learned that CLPS has generated,” he said.
An example he offered is that, in CLPS, companies buy their own launches, rather than have NASA procure them separately. “The government is not in the middle of the launch procurement on CLPS. And how many of the CLPS missions have had launch issues? I don’t think any.”
“When we think about these commercial partnerships at Mars, what we want to do is make sure that there are commercial applications,” Cummings said. “If NASA is the only customer for a system, you can still do fixed firm-price development, which you should do. You can still have competition.”
Sanford said that other commercial service programs also initially had few, if any, non-NASA customers, like commercial crew and cargo.
| “I don’t see, personally, a huge commercial interest, at least in the near future, of going to Mars unless you’re supporting NASA or ESA” or other national space agencies, Fox said. |
“But you could sell the infrastructure and the underlying capability across multiple providers,” like the launch vehicles used to provide the services, he said. “As you lower the cost of that capability, you have more and more customers that come and start to take advantage of that.”
Ferring said there’s been a slow increase in non-NASA business for commercial lunar landers. “It’s taken about five years on CLPS to see enough commercial activity to fund a full mission,” he said. “In the first three years, there was none. There was zero commercial interest.”
One of the initial markets considered for CMPS, communications services, may have been overtaken by events. The budget reconciliation bill enacted last month included $700 million for NASA to procure a Mars Telecommunications Orbiter that would support future NASA Mars missions, including human exploration. The bill directs NASA to procure the orbiter using a competition and a fixed-price contract, but says nothing about buying services.
Both Blue Origin and Rocket Lab have expressed interest in bidding on that orbiter. Rocket Lab discussed its plans for the last couple months for a Mars relay orbiter. “The path to Mars for human spaceflight must begin with the ability to communicate there, and this is something that we have always strongly pushed for,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in an earnings call earlier this month.
Blue Origin said last week it had created a concept for a Mars communications satellite using the Blue Ring spacecraft the company is developing. As part of the commercial Mars studies, the company showed how Blue Ring could deliver up to 1,250 kilograms of payloads to low Martian orbit, then maneuver to a higher orbit to serve as a communications relay.
Even if communications isn’t procured as a service, it could be enabling for other services. Lasater said that having a communications network at Mars could support its imagery plans there. “Pricing changes quite a bit if we have the high-data-rate backhaul. It allows us to drop that pricing significantly.”
He suggested that could enable more customers for that Mars imagery. “Can you imagine being able to go and get a picture of Mars for a couple of hundred bucks or even less, whenever you want?”
Meanwhile, SpaceX is gearing up for its next Starship test flight, now scheduled for no earlier than Sunday. It comes after the previous three flights all suffered mission-ending malfunctions as well as the loss of a Starship upper stage during preparations for a static-fire test in June.
Any chances of sending Starships to Mars in 2026, perhaps with payloads from ASI and other customers, will depend on having a successful flight this time. “A lot needs to go right for that,” Musk said of a 2026 Mars mission for a program where things have not been going right of late.
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