America was winning the race to find Martian life. Then China jumped in.

First, a NASA rover would land on Mars in a spot that once was potentially habitable—later determined to be Jezero Crater. It would zip about, look for layered rocks of the sort that you’d find in lakes and riverbeds, extract cores of them, and cache them in sealed containers. Then a second NASA spacecraft would land on Mars, receive the rover’s sample tubes (in one of several different ways), and transfer the samples to a rocket that would launch them into Martian orbit. A European-provided orbiter would catch that rocket like a baseball glove before returning home and dropping the rocks into Earth’s atmosphere, where they would be guided, via parachute, to eagerly awaiting scientists no later than the mid-2030s.

NASA/JPL-CALTECH VIA AP IMAGES

“Put simply, this is the most scientifically careful sample collection mission possible, conducted in one of the most promising places on Mars to look for signs of past life,” says Jonathan Lunine, the chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “And, of course, should evidence of life be found in the sediments, that would be an historic discovery.”

It got off to an auspicious start. On July 30, 2020, in the throes of the covid-19 pandemic, NASA’s Perseverance rover launched atop a rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral. The NASA administrator at the time, Jim Bridenstine, didn’t mince words: “We are in extraordinary times right now,” he told reporters, “yet we have in fact persevered, and we have protected this mission because it is so important.” 

But just earlier that same month, the mission to Mars had turned into a race. China was now prepping its own sample return spacecraft.

And that’s when things for MSR started to unravel. 

XINMEI LIU

China was comparatively late to develop a competitive space program, but once it began doing so, it wasted no time. In 2003, it first sent one of its astronauts into space, via its own bespoke rocket; in the two decades since, it has launched its own space station and sent multiple uncrewed spacecraft to the moon—first orbiters, then landers—as part of its Chang’e Project, named after a lunar goddess. 

But a real turning point for China’s interplanetary ambitions came in 2020, the same year as Perseverance’s launch to Mars. 

That December, Chang’e-5 touched down in the moon’s Ocean of Storms, a realm of frozen lava 1,600 miles long. It grabbed some 2-billion-year-old rocks, put them in a rocket, and blasted them into the firmament. The samples were captured by a small orbiting spacecraft; crucially, the idea was not all that dissimilar from how MSR imagined catching its own samples, baseball-glove style. China’s lunar haul was then dropped off back on Earth just before Christmas. It marked the first time since 1976 that samples had been returned from the moon, and the mission was seamless.