WASHINGTON — NASA is still working on a strategy to procure a Mars communications spacecraft funded in the budget reconciliation bill even as the agency moves more towards a services approach to communications.
The budget reconciliation bill enacted in July included $700 million for NASA to procure a Mars telecommunications orbiter. Such a spacecraft would orbit Mars and serve as a relay between Earth and other missions on or orbiting Mars.
NASA has not announced details about how it will procure the orbiter using that funding. The bill requires that the orbiter be complete and delivered to NASA, but not necessarily in operation or even launched, by the end of 2028.
At a Aug. 26 Washington Space Business Roundtable event, Kevin Coggins, NASA deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation, said the agency was still working on a plan for how to procure that orbiter.
“I wouldn’t predetermine how we’re going to execute that acquisition,” he said. “We’re going to comply with the language.”
That language is rather prescriptive regarding how NASA should procure the orbiter. It directs NASA to compete the orbiter and use a fixed firm price contract for it. It would be required to support both a future Mars Sample Return mission as well as future robotic and crewed Mars missions. It must also incorporate “autonomous operations, onboard processing, and extended mission duration capabilities.”
While requiring NASA to compete the contract for the orbiter, the bill would restrict that competition to companies that participated in design studies funded in 2024 to look at alternative architectures for MSR and had proposed an independent Mars telecommunications orbiter supporting that architecture.
Both Blue Origin and Rocket Lab have publicized their interest in bidding on the Mars telecommunications orbiter. Rocket Lab started promoting its concept for an orbiter before passage of the budget reconciliation bill, while Blue Origin announces its concept for that orbiter, based on its Blue Ring spacecraft, earlier this month.
“We’re still working on a procurement approach for that,” Coggins said of the Mars telecom orbiter, “but when it hits the public airwaves, I think everybody will be really excited about the innovative approach we’re taking with commercial partners.”
Procuring an orbiter, even under a fixed-price contract, would clash with NASA’s efforts to instead purchase communications services from the private sector. That is underway in Earth orbit and extending to the moon, and NASA last year awarded studies to several companies to look at Mars communications services. That included SpaceX, which proposed a version of its Starlink constellation at Mars dubbed “Marslink”.
The intent of those efforts is to bring in companies that can provide services to NASA, as well as other customers, and move more quickly than the agency, he said. “The government will not be able to invest or innovate as fast as a commercial partner who’s trying to capture market, especially when the market is attractive.”
NASA is working on that transition, with long-term plans to phase out its Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) network of communications satellites in geostationary orbit in favor of commercial services. The agency is working with several companies through the Commercial Services Project to demonstrate commercial capabilities while closing off TDRS to new missions late last year. It separately selected four companies to provide communications services for missions from Earth orbit to beyond the moon.
Coggins said that has been “a big paradigm shift” for an agency used to dictating specific details about how it handled communications for its missions. “We had to get them to think about this new line of thinking that we sign up for agreements, for capability,” he said. “These companies, we can’t command them to use their dishes or their satellites in a certain way. We have to tell them what we need.”
That can be done, he said, without sacrificing performance or reliability. “Most commercial companies provide far better reliability and capability than the governments had ever in the space program, because this is how you make money,” he argued.
Coggins also played down concerns about the budget for his office. “Our budget is great. We’re funded to do everything we need to do to support this agency and our commercial space partners,” he said. “I couldn’t be happier about where our budget is.”
NASA’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal would cut the budget for its Space Communications and Navigation, or SCaN, program by about 25%. That would “require the cessation of various projects, including reduction or elimination of technology development efforts,” the agency’s budget proposal stated. NASA paused procurement in July of ground stations for lunar communications, the Lunar Exploration Ground Sites, citing budget uncertainty.
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