For decades, NASA built and flew its own relay orbit and spacecraft, bringing valuable data back to Earth. Currently, agents are moving to purchasing connections as services, as well as launches and astronaut transport.
That pivot causes races, with key candidates pitching how to keep Mars missions online. It’s not a single contract that’s at risk. It’s a data pipe to Mars.
This new approach, combining NASA assets with commercial infrastructure, gradually replaces the patchwork relay networks that agencies rely on today. Generally, it works by orbiters like Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Maven, picking up data from Rovers and Lander, and sending it to giant antennas in Deep Space Networks (DSNs) on Earth.
NASA’s relay spacecraft is still healthy, but never became a permanent backbone. The agency’s latest senior review on planetary missions will invoke Maven’s important role as a relay and provide instructions to make it available in the early 2030s. But in the end, this hardware collapses.
At the same time, NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (Scan) program, which manages DSNs, is looking for solutions to enhance these aging assets. The aim is to create an interoperable market where NASA can become one of many customers rather than the owner’s operator, according to RFP, which was released in July and released today.
The current request is not an immediate hardware purchase, but especially for capabilities research. I have two questions. End-to-end Mars communications that move data between the moon and Earth, and its surface assets, Mars orbit, and to the center of operation of Earth.
It’s a formidable challenge. All architectures must compete with the vast distances between Earth, the Moon and Mars, long latency, windows of periodic solar interference and Earth’s visibility, and the high requirements of fault-resistant systems. So NASA is looking for plans and is measuring how the industry can quickly solve these puzzles and how they solve these puzzles rather than jumping straight into procurement.
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TechCrunch cannot see which companies are submitting concept proposals, but a handful are already betting their place in the race.
Blue Origin announced the Mars telecommunications orbiter built on a blue ring platform in 2028, pitched as a steady, high-performance spacecraft to support NASA missions to Mars.
In 2024, NASA’s Mars Exploration Program separately funded 12 short commercial service studies, including a trio of next-generation relay services to SpaceX, Lockheed Martin and Blue Origin. SpaceX’s proposal to “adapt Earth-orbit communications satellites for Mars” is probably derived from its Starlink Internet satellite constellations.
The long-term goal is to change the agency’s planetary exploration agenda from a pure science mission to a permanent human existence on the moon and ultimately Mars.
