China Plans Mars Sample Return by 2031 as U.S. Cancels Its Own Mission

For decades, the dream of holding Martian soil in human hands belonged, in ambition if not in deed, to the United States. Now, as NASA steps back from its own sample-return program amid budget pressures and technical complexity, China has stepped forward — announcing a 2028 launch that could deliver the first Martian samples to Earth by 2031. The shift is less a story of American failure than of a world in which the frontier of planetary science is no longer the province of a single nation.