2026-02-27 21:10:00
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
AI is rewiring how the world’s best Go players think
Ten years ago AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s AI program, stunned the world by defeating the South Korean Go player Lee Sedol.
And in the years since, AI has upended the game. It’s overturned centuries-old principles about the best moves and introduced entirely new ones. Players now train to replicate AI’s moves as closely as they can rather than inventing their own, even when the machine’s thinking remains mysterious to them. Meanwhile, AI is democratizing access to training, and more female players are climbing the ranks as a result.
Today, it is essentially impossible to compete professionally without using AI. Some say the technology has drained the game of its creativity, while others think there is still room for human invention. Read the full story.
—Michelle Kim
MIT Technology Review Narrated: Hackers made death threats against this security researcher. Big mistake.
In April 2024, a mysterious someone using the online handles “Waifu” and “Judische” began posting death threats on Telegram and Discord channels aimed at a cybersecurity researcher named Allison Nixon.
As chief research officer at the cyber investigations firm Unit 221B, Nixon had built a career tracking cybercriminals and helping get them arrested. And although she had taken an interest in the Waifu persona in years past for crimes he boasted about committing, he hadn’t been on her radar for a while when the threats began, because she was tracking other targets.
Now Nixon resolved to unmask Waifu/Judische and others responsible for the death threats—and take them down for crimes they admitted to committing.
This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Anthropic has refused the Pentagon’s AI demands
It’s holding firm on its stance: no mass surveillance of Americans, and no lethal autonomous weapons. (The Verge)
+ Anthropic said “virtually no progress” had been made during recent talks. (The Hill)
+ Here’s how relations between the US government and the company started to dissolve. (Vox)
2 Instagram will alert parents if teens repeatedly search for suicide material
But campaigners fear the measure could do more harm than good. (BBC)
+ Instagram is working on a similar alert feature for its AI tools. (Engadget)
+ Poland is weighing up banning under-15s from accessing social media. (Bloomberg $)
3 ChatGPT Health regularly fails to recognize medical emergencies
In more than half of serious cases, it advised users to delay seeking treatment. (The Guardian)
+ “Dr. Google” had its issues. Can ChatGPT Health do better? (MIT Technology Review)
4 The Islamic State’s online warriors are posting beyond the grave
The group is using AI to resurrect dead leaders and port them to new platforms. (404 Media)
5 Vegetarians are at lower risk from five types of cancer
It suggests that avoiding meat could help to avoid certain cancers, including breast and pancreatic. (FT $)
+ Interestingly, the same doesn’t apply for vegans. (Bloomberg $)
+ RFK Jr. follows a carnivore diet. That doesn’t mean you should. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Activists combating online abuse have been barred from America
Authorities accused HateAid of participating in a “global censorship-industrial complex.” (NYT $)
+ What it’s like to be banned from the US for fighting online hate. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Russians are looking for missing soldiers on Google Maps
They’re posting reviews pleading for information about missing loved ones. (New Yorker $)
+ Google Maps has finally gained approval to operate in South Korea. (FT $)
+ It’s hellbent on closing its final few global gaps. (Economist $)
8 Burger King’s new AI assistant will evaluate workers’ friendliness
It’ll check interactions to make sure they’re saying please and thank you. (The Verge)
+ Perplexity’s bossy new AI agent assigns work to fellow agents. (Ars Technica)
9 NASA still hasn’t made it back to the moon
The mission has been dogged by delays and issues. (WP $)
10 Are you Chinamaxxing yet?
Everyone on TikTok is, c’mon. (Insider $)
Quote of the day
“This is as much of a political fight as a military use issue.”
—Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, who researches AI in warfare, explains to the Washington Post why ideological differences are likely to be worsening the rift between Anthropic and the Pentagon.
One more thing
One city’s fight to solve its sewage problem with sensors
In the city of South Bend, Indiana, wastewater from people’s kitchens, sinks, washing machines, and toilets flows through 35 neighborhood sewer lines. On good days, just before each line ends, a vertical throttle pipe diverts the sewage into an interceptor tube, which carries it to a treatment plant where solid pollutants and bacteria are filtered out.
As in many American cities, those pipes are combined with storm drains, which can fill rivers and lakes with toxic sludge when heavy rains or melted snow overwhelms them, endangering wildlife and drinking water supplies. But city officials have a plan to make its aging sewers significantly smarter. Read the full story.
—Andrew Zaleski
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ This is a fascinating insight into Jimi Hendrix’s technical guitar wizardry 
+ The Romans: their lives really weren’t so different to ours, y’know.
+ How the Beatles kicked back and relaxed at home when they weren’t shaping history.
+ Disney composer Alan Menken is an undisputed talent.
2026-02-27 18:00:00
Burrowed in the alleys of Hongik-dong, a hushed residential neighborhood in eastern Seoul, is a faded stone-tiled building stamped “Korea Baduk Association,” the governing body for professional Go. The game is an ancient one, with sacred stature in South Korea.
But inside the building, rooms once filled with the soft clatter of hands dipping into wooden bowls of stones now echo with mouse clicks. Players hunch over their monitors and replay their matches in an AI program. Others huddle around a Go board and debate the best next move, while coaches report how their choices stack up against the AI’s. Some sit in silence, watching AI programs play against each other.
Ten years ago AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s AI program, stunned the world by defeating the South Korean Go player Lee Sedol. And in the years since, AI has upended the game. It’s overturned centuries-old principles about the best moves and introduced entirely new ones. Players now train to replicate AI’s moves as closely as they can rather than inventing their own, even when the machine’s thinking remains mysterious to them. Today, it is essentially impossible to compete professionally without using AI. Some say the technology has drained the game of its creativity, while others think there is still room for human invention. Meanwhile, AI is democratizing access to training, and more female players are climbing the ranks as a result.
For Shin Jin-seo, the top-ranked Go player in the world, AI is an invaluable training partner. Every morning, he sits at his computer and opens a program called KataGo. Nicknamed “Shintelligence” for how closely his moves mimic AI’s, he traces the glowing “blue spot” that represents the program’s suggestion for the best next move, rearranging the stones on the digital grid to try to understand the machine’s thinking. “I constantly think about why AI chose a move,” he says.
When training for a match, Shin spends most of his waking hours poring over KataGo. “It’s almost like an ascetic practice,” he says. According to a study in 2022 by the Korean Baduk League, Shin’s moves match AI’s 37.5% of the time, well above the 28.5% average the study found among all players.
“My game has changed a lot,” says Shin, “because I have to follow the directions suggested by AI to some extent.” The Korea Baduk Association says it has reached out to Google DeepMind in the hopes of arranging a match between Shin and AlphaGo, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of its victory over Lee. A spokesperson for Google DeepMind said the company could not provide information at this time. But if a new match does happen, Shin, who has trained on more advanced AI programs, is optimistic that he’d win. “AlphaGo still had some flaws then, so I think I could beat it if I target those weaknesses,” he says.
Go is an abstract strategy board game invented in China more than 2,500 years ago. Two players take turns placing black and white stones on a 19×19 grid, aiming to conquer territory by surrounding their opponent’s stones. It’s a game of striking mathematical complexity. The number of possible board configurations—roughly 10170—dwarfs the number of atoms in the universe. If chess is a battle, Go is a war. You suffocate your enemy in one corner while fending off an invasion in another.
To train AI to play Go, a vast trove of human Go moves are fed into a neural network, a computing system that mimics the web of neurons in the human brain. AlphaGo, which was later christened AlphaGo Lee after its victory over Lee Sedol, was trained on 30 million Go moves and refined by playing millions of games against itself. In 2017, its successor, AlphaGo Zero, picked up Go from scratch. Without studying any human games, it learned by playing against itself, with moves based only on the rules of the game. The blank-slate approach proved more powerful, unconstrained by the limits of human knowledge. After three days of training, it beat AlphaGo Lee 100 games to zero.
Google DeepMind retired AlphaGo that same year. But then a wave of open-source models inspired by AlphaGo Zero emerged. Today, KataGo is the program most widely used by professional Go players in South Korea. It’s faster and sharper than AlphaGo. It’s learned to predict not just who will win, but also who owns each point on the board at any given moment. While AlphaGo Zero pieced together its understanding of the board by looking at small sections, KataGo learned to read the whole board, developing better judgment for long-term strategies. Instead of just learning how to win, it learned to maximize its score.
The software has reshaped how people play. For hundreds of years, professional Go players have navigated the game’s astronomical complexity by developing heuristics that replaced brute calculation. Elegant opening strategies imposed abstract order on the empty grid. Invading corners early was a bad bargain. Each generation of Go players added new principles to the canon.
But “AI has changed everything,” says Park Jeong-sang, a South Korean Go commentator. “Fundamental moves that were once considered common sense aren’t played at all today, and techniques that didn’t exist before have become popular.”
The starkest shift has been in opening moves. Go starts on a blank grid, and the first 50 moves were canvases for abstract thinking and creativity, where players etched their personalities and philosophies. Lee Sedol fashioned provocative moves that invited chaos. Ke Jie, a Chinese player who was defeated by AlphaGo Master in 2017, dazzled with agile, imaginative moves. Now, players memorize the same strain of efficient, calculated opening moves suggested by AI. The crux of the game has shifted to the middle moves, where raw calculation matters more than creativity.
Training with AI has led to a homogenization of playing styles. Ke Jie has lamented the strain of watching the same opening moves recycled endlessly. “I feel the exact same way as the fans watching. It’s very tiring and painful to watch,” he told a Chinese news outlet in 2021. Fans revel when a player breaks from the script with offbeat moves, but those moments have become rarer. Over a third of moves by the top Go players replicate AI’s recommendations, according to a study in 2023. The first 50 moves of each game are often identical to what AI suggests, many players say.
“Go has become a mind sport,” says Lee Sedol, who retired three years after his 2016 defeat to AlphaGo. “Before AI, we sought something greater. I learned Go as an art,” he says. “But if you copy your moves from an answer key, that’s no longer art.”
Playing Go is no longer about charting new frontiers, some players say, but about following the dictates of a superhuman oracle. “I used to inspire fans by advancing the techniques of Go and presenting a new paradigm,” says Lee. “My reason for playing Go has vanished.”
The players who have stayed in the game are trying to reinvent their craft. But it can be hard to discern what the new principles are.
Disarmingly slight and formidably calm, Kim Chae-young, one of the top female Go players in the world, grew up learning the game from her father, who was also a professional Go player. But when AI began to reshape the game, she found herself starting over. “I needed time to abandon everything I had learned before,” says Kim who shared her screen with me as she pointed her cursor to the blue spots suggested by KataGo. “The intuition I had built up over the years turned out to be wrong.”
As she leaned close to her monitor, her blinking screen showed the winning probabilities of each move, with no explanations. Even top players like Kim and Shin don’t understand all of AI’s moves. “It seems like it’s thinking in a higher dimension,” she says. When she tries to learn from AI, she adds, “it’s less about rationally thinking through each move, but more about developing a gut feeling—an intuition.”
Researchers are trying to discover the superhuman knowledge encoded in game-playing AI programs so that humans can learn it too. In 2024, researchers at Google DeepMind extracted new chess concepts from AlphaZero, a generalized version of AlphaGo Zero that can also play chess, and taught them to chess grandmasters using chess puzzles. The Go concepts that players have picked up from AI systems so far are “probably only a small portion of what you could potentially learn,” says Nicholas Tomlin, a computer scientist at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, who coauthored a study probing Go concepts encoded in AlphaGo Zero.
But extracting those lessons remains a struggle. “Top-tier players haven’t yet been able to deduce the general principles behind AI moves,” says Nam Chi-hyung, a Go professor at Myongji University. Although they can emulate AI’s moves, they have yet to glean a new paradigm for the game because its reasoning is a black box, she says. Go may be in an epistemic limbo.
Even if AI is an opaque teacher, it’s a democratic one. It has supercharged training for female Go players, who have long been underdogs of the game. For decades, training meant studying under top male players, and the most competitive matches took place in male circles that were difficult for women to break into, says Nam. “Female players never had access to that experience,” she says. “But now they can study with AI, which has made their training environment much more favorable.” More broadly, AI has narrowed the gap between players by helping everyone perfect their opening moves.
Female players have climbed the ranks over the last few years as a result. In 2022, Choi Jeong, then the top female player in the world, became the first woman to reach the finals of a major international Go tournament. Dubbed “Girl Wrestler” for her fierce, combative style of play, she took on Shin. She lost, but the match broke new ground for women in Go. In 2024, Kim made headlines for winning the Korean Go League’s postseason playoffs. She was the only female player in the tournament.
Training with AI has given Kim newfound confidence. Analyzing male players’ moves with AI has shattered their veneer of infallibility. “Before, I couldn’t gauge just how strong top male players were—they felt invincible. Now, I know that they make mistakes, and their moves aren’t always brilliant,” she says. “AI broke the psychological barrier.”
Although AI has mastered Go far better than any player, fans continue to prefer watching people play. “A Go game between AI programs is not very fun for fans to watch,” says Park, the Go commentator. Such matches are too complex for fans to follow, too flawless to be thrilling, he says.
Players can mimic AI’s opening moves, but in the middle game—where the board branches into too many possibilities to memorize—their own judgment takes over. Fans revel in watching players make mistakes and mount comebacks, exuding personality in every stone on the board. Shin’s playing style is combative but marked by machinelike poise. Kim deftly navigates the most chaotic positions on the board.
“In Go, every move is a choice you make, and your opponent responds with a choice of their own,” says Kim Dae-hui, 27, a Go fan and amateur player. “Watching that process unfold is fun.”
With fans like Kim still watching, Shin finds meaning in his game. “I can play a kind of Go that tells a story that only a human can,” he says.
After his retirement, Lee searched for a new job where he could have an edge as a human. He started making board games, giving speeches, and teaching students at a university. “I’m looking for a new domain that I can enjoy and excel at,” he says.
But lately, he feels more hopeful for the game he left behind. “It’s every Go player’s dream to play a masterpiece game,” he says—a game of technical brilliance, with no mistakes, fought to a razor’s edge between evenly matched players. “It’s like a mirage,” Lee says, chuckling. “Maybe AI can help us play a masterpiece.”
Shin hopes he can do that. To Shin, AI is a teacher, a companion, and a North Star. “I may be one of the strongest human players, but with AI around, I can’t be so arrogant,” he says. “AI gives me a reason to keep improving.”
2026-02-26 23:00:59
For years, Industry 4.0 transformation has centered on the convergence of intelligent technologies like AI, cloud, the internet of things, robotics, and digital twins. Industry 5.0 marks a pivotal shift from integrating emerging technologies to orchestrating them at scale. With Industry 5.0, the purpose of this interconnected web of technologies is more nuanced: to augment human potential, not just automate work, and enhance environmental sustainability.
Industry 5.0 has ushered in a radically new level of collaboration between humans and machines, one that removes data silos and optimizes infrastructure, operations, and resource use to disrupt business models and create new forms of enterprise value. But without discipline in tracking value creation, investments risk being wasted on incremental efficiency gains rather than strategic growth.
“To realize the promise of Industry 5.0, companies must move beyond cost and efficiency to focus on growth, resilience, and human-centric outcomes,” says Sachin Lulla, EY Americas industrials and energy transformation leader. “This requires not just new technologies, but new ways of working—where people and machines collaborate, and where value is measured not just in dollars saved, but in new opportunities created.”
An MIT Technology Review Insights survey of 250 industry leaders from around the world reveals most industrial investments still target efficiency. And while the data shows human-centric and sustainable use cases deliver higher value, they are underfunded. The research shows most organizations are not realizing the full value potential of Industry 5.0 due to a combination of:
• Culture, skills, and collaboration barriers.
• Tactical and misaligned technology investments.
• Use-case prioritization focused on efficiency over growth, sustainability, and well-being.
The barrier to achieving Industry 5.0 transformation is not only about fixing the technology, according to research from EY and Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, it is also about bolstering human-centric elements like strategy, culture, and leadership. Companies are investing heavily in digital transformation, but not always in ways that unlock the full human potential of Industry 5.0.
“We’re not just doing digital work for work’s sake, what I call ‘chasing the digital fairies,’” says Chris Ware, general manager, iron ore digital, Rio Tinto. “We have to be very clear on what pieces of work we go after and why. Every domain has a unique roadmap about how to deliver the best value.”
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
2026-02-26 21:10:00
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
America was winning the race to find Martian life. Then China jumped in.
In July 2024, NASA’s Perseverance rover came across a peculiar rocky outcrop on Mars covered in strange spots. On Earth, these marks are almost always produced by microbial life.
Sure, those specks are not definitive proof of alien life. But they are the best hint yet that life may not be a one-off event in the cosmos.
But the only way to know for sure is to bring a sample of that rock home to study.
Now, just over a year and a half later, the project to do so is on life support, with zero funding flowing in 2026 and little backing left in Congress. As a result, those oh-so-promising rocks may be stuck out there forever.
This also means that, in the race to find evidence of alien life, America has effectively ceded its pole position to its greatest geopolitical rival: China. The superpower is moving full steam ahead with its own version of the mission to bring the rock samples home. It’s leaner than America and Europe’s mission, and the rock samples it will snatch from Mars will likely not be as high quality. But that won’t be the headline people remember—the one in the scientific journals and the history books.
Nearly a dozen project insiders and scientists in both the US and China shared with me the story of how America blew its lead in the new space race. It’s full of wild dreams and promising discoveries—as well as mismanagement, eye-watering costs, and, ultimately, anger and disappointment. Read the full story.
—Robin George Andrews
This article is also part of the Big Story series: MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting. The stories in the series take a deep look at the technologies that are coming next and what they will mean for us and the world we live in. Check out the rest of them here.
This company claims a battery breakthrough. Now they need to prove it.
When a company claims to have created what’s essentially the holy grail of batteries, there are bound to be some questions.
Interest has been swirling since Donut Lab, a Finnish company, announced last month that it had a new solid-state battery technology, one that was ready for large-scale production. The company said its batteries can charge super-fast and have a high energy density that would translate to ultra-long-range EVs. What’s more, it claimed the cells can operate safely in the extreme heat and cold, contain “green and abundant materials,” and would cost less than lithium-ion batteries do today.
It sounded amazing—this sort of technology could transform the EV industry. But many quickly wondered if it was all too good to be true. Let’s dig into why this company is making news, why many experts are skeptical, and what it all means for the battery industry right now.
—Casey Crownhart
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Chinese law enforcement tried to get ChatGPT to discredit Japan’s prime minister
OpenAI claims the chatbot refused to help plan an online smear campaign. (Axios)
+ The user asked ChatGPT to edit status reports on covert influence operations. (Bloomberg $)
2 Meta’s AI is sending junk tips to child abuse investigators
Not only are they a serious drain on resources—they’re hindering investigations. (The Guardian)
+ US investigators are using AI to detect child abuse images made by AI. (MIT Technology Review)
3 A judge has dismissed xAI’s lawsuit against OpenAI
Elon Musk’s startup has failed to prove that its rival committed any misconduct. (Ars Technica)
+ xAI had accused former employees of taking trade secrets to OpenAI. (Reuters)
+ It could refile, but would need to modify its claims. (The Verge)
4 China appears to be masking regular drone flights
In what could be rehearsals for a potential invasion of Taiwan. (Reuters)
+ Taiwan’s “silicon shield” could be weakening. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Pro-AI super PACs are raising huge sums ahead of the US midterm elections
They’re making significantly higher sums than their pro-regulation counterparts. (FT $)
+ Anthropic is backing a regulation-friendly PAC group called Public First Action. (NYT $)
6 Experts are worried about AI slop videos’ effects on child development
The nonsensical clips tend to lack structure and confuse children.(NYT $)
7 Around 400 million people are living with long covid
And its effects are rippling far beyond its physical symptoms. (Bloomberg $)
+ Scientists are finding signals of long covid in blood. They could lead to new treatments. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Tech bros are opting out of interviews with mainstream media
And gravitating toward much less critical online streams. (New Yorker $)
9 The ISS is surprisingly vulnerable
There’s a major gap in its critical defenses. (Wired $)
+ Data centers are heading to space, and our laws aren’t ready. (Rest of World)
+ Meet the astronaut training tourists to fly in the world’s first commercial space station. (MIT Technology Review)
10 We’ve lost our appetite for fake meat 
Even plant-based meat makers are admitting some products don’t taste great. (Economist $)
+ The price of (real) beef has soared recently. (The Guardian)
+ Here’s what a lab-grown burger tastes like. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“We are using carrots and sticks.”
—Seth Besmertnik, chief executive of digital marketing startup Conductor, explains his approach to vigorously vetting his workers’ AI literacy to the Wall Street Journal.
One more thing
Tiny faux organs could crack the mystery of menstruation
No one is entirely sure how—or why—the human body choreographs menstruation; the monthly dance of cellular birth, maturation, and death. Many people desperately need treatments to make their period more manageable, but it’s difficult for scientists to design medications without understanding how menstruation really works.
That understanding could be in the works, thanks to endometrial organoids—biomedical tools made from bits of the tissue that lines the uterus, called the endometrium. Organoids have already provided insights into how endometrial cells communicate and coordinate, and why menstruation is routine for some people and fraught for others—and some researchers are hopeful that these early results mark the dawn of a new era. Read the full story.
—Saima Sidik
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ The crazy but true story about the Elder Scrolls III fans who built a world the size of a small country into it.
+ How to master the tricky art of making the perfect sourdough loaf.
+ This adorable Pika is the real-life inspiration for Pikachu.
+ How many of these animated classics have you seen?
2026-02-26 19:00:00
When a company claims to have created what’s essentially the holy grail of batteries, there are bound to be some questions.
Interest has been swirling since Donut Lab, a Finnish company, announced last month that it had a new solid-state battery technology, one that was ready for large-scale production. The company said its batteries can charge super-fast and have a high energy density that would translate to ultra-long-range EVs. What’s more, it claimed the cells can operate safely in the extreme heat and cold, contain “green and abundant materials,” and would cost less than lithium-ion batteries do today.
It sounded amazing—this sort of technology could transform the EV industry. But many quickly wondered if it was all too good to be true. Now, Donut Lab is releasing a series of videos that it says will prove its technology has the secret sauce. Let’s dig into why this company is making news, why many experts are skeptical, and what it all means for the battery industry right now.
Solid-state batteries could deliver the next generation of EVs. In place of a liquid electrolyte (the material that ions move through inside a battery), the cells use a solid material, so they can be more compact. That means a significantly longer range, which could get more people excited to drive EVs.
The problem is, getting these batteries to work and making them at the large scale required for the EV industry hasn’t been a simple task. Some of the world’s most powerful automakers and battery companies have been trying for years to get the technology off the ground. (Toyota at one point said it would have solid-state batteries in cars by 2020. Now it’s shooting for 2027 or 2028.)
While it’s been a long time coming, it does feel as if solid-state batteries are closer than ever. Much of the progress so far has been on semi-solid-state batteries, which use materials like gels for electrolytes. But some companies, including several in China, are getting closer to true solid state. The world’s largest battery company, CATL, plans to manufacture small quantities in 2027. Another major Chinese automaker, Changan, plans to start testing installation of all-solid-state batteries in vehicles this year, with mass production expected to begin next year.
Still, Donut Lab surprised the battery industry when, in a video released in early January ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company claimed it would put the world’s first all-solid-state battery into production vehicles.
One of the splashiest claims in the announcement was that cells would have an energy density of 400 watt-hours per kilogram (the top commercial lithium-ion batteries today sit at about 250 to 300 Wh/kg). It was also claimed that the cells could charge in as little as five minutes, last 100,000 cycles, and retain 99% of capacity at high and low temperatures—while costing less than lithium-ion cells and being made from “100% green and abundant materials with global availability.”
Many experts were immediately skeptical. “In the solid-state field, the technical barriers are very high,” said Shirley Meng, a professor of molecular engineering at the University of Chicago, when I spoke with her last month. She’d recently attended CES and visited Donut Lab’s booth. “They had zero demo, so I don’t believe it,” she says. “Call me conservative, but I would rather be careful than be sorry later.”
“It’s one of those things where nobody knows—they’ve never heard of it,” said Eric Wachsman, a professor at the University of Maryland and cofounder of the solid-state battery company Ion Storage Systems, in a January interview. “They came out of nowhere.”
Donut Lab has shared very little about what, exactly, this technology might be. It’s not uncommon for battery companies (or any startup, for that matter) to be quiet about technical details before they can get patents filed to protect their technology. But the combination of claims didn’t seem to line up with any known chemistries, leaving experts speculating and, in many cases, doubting Donut Lab’s claims.
“All the parameters are contradictory,” said Yang Hongxin, chairman and CEO of the Chinese battery giant Svolt Energy, in remarks to news outlets in January. For example, there’s often a trade-off between high energy density, which requires thicker electrodes that can store more energy, and fast charging, which requires ions to move quickly through cells. High-performance batteries are also expected to be costly, but Donut Lab claims its technology will be cheaper than lithium-ion technology.
In a new video released last week, Donut Lab cofounder and CEO Marko Lehtimäki announced the company would be releasing a video series, called “I Donut Believe,” that would provide evidence for their claims. As a header on the accompanying website reads: “Fair enough. Here you go.”
When the website went up last week, it included a countdown timer to Monday February 23, when the company released results from its first third-party testing: a fast charging test. The test showed that a single cell could charge from 0% to 80% capacity in about four and a half minutes—incredibly quick and quite impressive results. (One potential caveat to note is that the cells heated up quite a bit, so thermal management could be important in designing vehicles that use these batteries.)
Even as we see the first technical test results, I’m still left with a lot of questions. How many cycles could this battery do at this charging speed? Can this same cell meet the company’s other performance claims? (I’ve reached out to Donut Lab several times over the past month, both to the company’s press email and to leadership on LinkedIn, but I haven’t gotten a response yet.)
The company has certainly drummed up a lot of interest and attention with its rollout, and the theatrics aren’t over yet. There’s another countdown timer on Donut Lab’s site, which ends on Monday, March 2.
I’m the first one to get excited about a new battery technology. But there’s a sentiment I’ve seen pop up a lot recently online, and one I can’t get out of my head as I continue to follow this story: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
2026-02-26 18:00:00
To most people, rocks are just rocks. To geologists, they are much, much more: crystal-filled time capsules with the power to reveal the state of the planet at the very moment they were forged.
For decades, NASA had been on a time capsule hunt like none other—one across Mars.
Its rovers have journeyed around a nightmarish ocher desert that, billions of years ago, was home to rivers, lakes, perhaps even seas and oceans. They’ve been seeking to answer a momentous question: Once upon a time, did microbial life wriggle across its surface?
Then, in July 2024, after more than three years on the planet, the Perseverance rover came across a peculiar rocky outcrop. Instead of the usual crystals or layers of sediment, this one had spots. Two kinds, in fact: one that looked like poppy seeds, and another that resembled those on a leopard. It’s possible that run-of-the-mill chemical reactions could have cooked up these odd features. But on Earth, these marks are almost always produced by microbial life.
To put it plainly: Holy crap.
Sure, those specks are not definitive proof of alien life. But they are the best hint yet that life may not be a one-off event in the cosmos. And they meant the most existential question of all—Are we alone?—might soon be addressed. “If you do it, then human history is never the same,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes planetary exploration and defense and the search for extraterrestrial life.
But the only way to confirm whether these seeds and spots are the fossilized imprint of alien biology is to bring a sample of that rock home to study.
Perseverance was the first stage of an ambitious scheme to do just that—in effect, to pull off a space heist. The mission—called Mars Sample Return and planned by the US, along with its European partners—would send a Rube Goldberg–like series of robotic missions to the planet to capture pristine rocks. The rover’s job was to find the most promising stones and extract samples; then it would pass them to another robot—the getaway driver—to take them off Mars and deliver them to Earth.
But now, just over a year and a half later, the project is on life support, with zero funding flowing in 2026 and little backing left in Congress. As a result, those oh-so-promising rocks may be stuck out there forever.
“We’ve spent 50 years preparing to get these samples back. We’re ready to do that,” says Philip Christensen, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who works closely with NASA. “Now we’re two feet from the finish line—Oh, sorry, we’re not going to complete the job.”
This also means that, in the race to find evidence of alien life, America has effectively ceded its pole position to its greatest geopolitical rival: China. The superpower is moving full steam ahead with its own version of MSR. It’s leaner than America and Europe’s mission, and the rock samples it will snatch from Mars will likely not be as high quality. But that won’t be the headline people remember—the one in the scientific journals and the history books. “At the rate we’re going, there’s a very good chance they’ll do it before we do,” laments Christensen. “Being there first is what matters.”
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s “America Undone” series, examining how the foundations of US success in science and innovation are currently under threat. You can read the rest here.
Of course, any finding of extraterrestrial life advances human knowledge writ large, no matter the identity of the discoverers. But there is the not-so-small issue of pride in an already heated nationalistic competition, not to mention the fact that many scientists in America (to say nothing of US lawmakers) don’t necessarily want their future research and scientific progress subject to a foreign gatekeeper. And even for those not especially concerned about potentially unearthing alien microbes, MSR and the comparable Chinese mission are technological stepping stones toward a long-held dream shared by many beyond Elon Musk: getting astronauts onto the Red Planet and, eventually, setting up long-term bases for astronauts there. It’d be a huge blow to show up only after a competitor had already set up shop … or not to get there at all.
“If we can’t do this, how do we think we’re gonna send humans there and get back safely?” says Victoria Hamilton, a planetary geologist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who is also the chair of the NASA-affiliated Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group.
Or as Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist from the Washington University in St. Louis, puts it: “If you’re going to bring humans back from Mars, you sure as shit have to figure out how to bring the samples back first.”
Nearly a dozen project insiders and scientists in both the US and China shared with me the story of how America blew its lead in the new space race. It’s full of wild dreams and promising discoveries—as well as mismanagement, eye-watering costs, and, ultimately, anger and disappointment.
“I spent most of my career studying Mars,” says Christensen. There are countless things about it that bewitch him. But by examining it, he suspects, we’ll get further than ever in the Homeric investigation of how life began.
Sure, the Mars of today is a postapocalyptic wasteland, an arid and cold desert bathed in lethal radiation. But billions of years ago, water lapped up against the slopes of fiery volcanoes that erupted under a clement sky. Then its geologic interior cooled down so quickly, changing everything. Its global magnetic field collapsed like a deflating balloon, and its protective atmosphere was stripped away by the sun.
Its surface is now remarkably hostile to life as we know it. But deep below ground, where it’s shielded from space, and where it’s warmer and wetter, there could maybe be microbes inching about.
Scientists have long possessed several Martian meteorites that have been flung our way, but none of them are pristine; they were all damaged by cosmic radiation midflight, before getting scorched in Earth’s atmosphere. Plus, there’s another problem: “We currently have no rocks from Mars that are sedimentary, the rock type likely to contain fossils,” says Sara Russell, a planetary scientist at London’s Natural History Museum.
For those, humans (or robots) would need to get on the ground.
NASA first made the stuff of sci-fi films a reality 50 years ago, when two Viking landers touched down on the planet in 1976. One of their experiments dropped some radioactively tagged nutrients into soil samples, the idea being that if any microbes were present, they’d gobble up the nutrients and burp out some radioactive waste gas that the landers could detect. Tantalizingly, this experiment hinted that something microbe-like was interacting with those nutrients—but the result was inconclusive (and today most scientists don’t suspect biology was responsible).
Still, it was enough to elevate scientists’ curiosity about the genuine possibility of Martian life. Over the coming decades, America sent an ever-expanding fleet of robots to Mars—orbiting spacecraft, landers, and wheeled rovers. But no matter how hard they studied their adoptive planet’s rocks, they weren’t designed to definitively detect signs of life. For that, promising-looking rocks would need to be captured and, somehow, shuttled back to labs on Earth in carefully sealed containers.
This became a top priority for the US planetary science community in 2003, following the publication of the first Planetary Decadal Survey, a census conducted at NASA’s request. The scientific case for the mission was clear—even to the people who didn’t think they’d find signs of life. “I bet there isn’t life on Mars. But if there is, or was, that would be an incredibly important discovery,” says Christensen. And if not, “Why not?”
He adds: “We may understand more about why life started on Earth by understanding why it may not have started on Mars. What was that key difference between those two planets?”
And so, MSR was born. America went all in, and the European Space Agency joined the team. Over the next decade or so, a complex plan was drawn up.
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.
“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.
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.
That same year, China made its first foray toward Mars. The project was called Tianwen-1, meaning “Questions to Heaven”—the first in a new series of audacious space missions to the Red Planet and orbiting asteroids. While its success was far from guaranteed, China was willing to kick into high gear immediately, sending both an orbiting spacecraft and a rover to Mars at the same time. No other country had ever managed to perform this act of spaceflight acrobatics on its first try.
Just as China ramped up its space schemes, some people in the scientific community began to wonder if NASA was (inadvertently) promising too much with MSR—and whether the heist would be worth the cost.
In 2020, the price tag for the program had jumped from an already expensive $5.3 billion to an estimated $7 billion. (For context, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, which is currently being pieced together, has a price tag of around $1.2 billion. This space observatory is designed to find Earthbound asteroids and is tasked with defending all 8 billion of us from a catastrophic impact.)
But Perseverance was already on its way to Mars. It wasn’t as if this expensive train could go back to the station. The project’s advocates just hoped it’d actually make it there in one piece.
While the US had previously entered Martian orbit successfully, several other entry, descent, and landing attempts on the planet had ended in explosive disaster; the primary antagonist is the Martian atmosphere, which can cause spacecraft to tumble wildly out of control or heat up and ignite. Perseverance would be traveling at nearly 12,500 miles per hour as it entered Mars’s airspace, and to land it’d need to decelerate, deploy a parachute, fire several rockets, and pilot itself to the skies above Jezero Crater—before a levitating crane would drop off the actual rover.
Thankfully, Perseverance’s deployment went off without a hitch. On February 18, 2021, Mars became its new home—and the rover’s makers hugged, high-fived, and whooped for joy in NASA’s flight control room.
As Lori Glaze, then director of NASA’s planetary science division, said at the time, “Now the fun really starts.”
That very same month, China arrived at Mars’s doorstep for the first time.
On February 10, 2021, Tianwen-1 began to orbit the planet. Then, on May 14, it slipped a drop shipment through the spacecraft-frying atmosphere to deliver a rover onto an expansive landscape called Utopia Planitia—giving Perseverance a neighbor, albeit one 1,200 miles away.
This explorer was nowhere near as sophisticated as Perseverance, and its assignment was a far cry from a sample return mission. It had some cameras and scientific instruments for studying its environment, making it comparable to one of NASA’s older rovers. It was also supposed to operate for just three months (though it ended up persisting for an entire year before being fatally smothered by pernicious Martian dust).
Nevertheless, Tianwen-1 was a remarkable achievement for China, one that the US couldn’t help but applaud. “This is a really big deal,” said Roger Launius, then NASA’s chief historian.
And even if grabbing pieces of Mars was increasingly likely in China’s future, it was already happening in the present for the US. The race, the Americans thought, was over before it had even begun … right?
Over the next few years, Perseverance went on an extraterrestrial joyride. It meandered through frozen flows of lava and journeyed over fans of sediment once washed about by copious liquid water. It pulled out rocks that preserved salty, muddy layers—exactly the environment that, on Earth, would be teeming with microorganisms and organic matter.
“Jezero Crater clearly meets the astrobiological criterion for a sampling site where life may once have existed,” says Lunine from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. “Rocks of broadly similar age and setting on Earth contain some of the earliest evidence for life on our own planet.”
Then, in September 2023, as Perseverance was trundling across the ruins of what may once have been a microbial metropolis, an independent panel of researchers published a report that made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that MSR was the opposite of okay.
They found that the project was too decentralized among the nation’s plethora of NASA centers, leaving confusion as to who was actually in charge. And at its current pace, MSR wouldn’t get its Mars rocks back home until the 2040s at the earliest—as much as a whole decade later than initial estimates. And it would cost as much as $11 billion, more than doubling the initial tab.
“MSR was established with unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning,” the report reads. “MSR was also organized under an unwieldy structure. As a result, there is currently no credible, congruent technical, nor properly margined schedule, cost, and technical baseline that can be accomplished with the likely available funding.”
Members of Congress started to wonder aloud whether MSR should be canceled outright, and the scientific community that had once so enthusiastically supported the mission faced a moment of reckoning.
Byrne, the planetary scientist from the Washington University in St. Louis, had always been something of a rebel, never really a fan of NASA’s multi-decadal, over-the-top fascination with Mars. The solar system, he argued, is filled with curious worlds to explore—especially Venus, another nearby rocky world that was once rather Earth-like. Couldn’t we spare some of NASA’s budget to make sure we explore Venus, too?
Still, like many other critical colleagues, Byrne did not want to see MSR put down. The report’s findings didn’t change the fact that Perseverance was dutifully working around the clock to accomplish the mission’s opening stages. What would be the point of gathering all those samples if they were going to be left to stay on Mars? The community, Byrne explains, just needed to answer one question: “How do you do this in a way that’s faster and cheaper?”
In April 2024, NASA publicly sought help from its industry partners in the space sector: Could anyone come up with a way to save MSR? Various players with spaceflight experience, like Lockheed Martin, sent in proposals for consideration.
Then, just a few months later in July 2024, Perseverance came in clutch, finding those special leopard-spotted and speckled rocks in an old river valley—a sign of hope that NASA had been desperately seeking. Now the agency’s request for help was all the more urgent—these rocks had to get home. After various panels assessed plans that could effectively save MSR, two potential options for a faster, leaner, less expensive version were previewed at a January 2025 press briefing.
One option brought in tried-and-tested tech: Since Perseverance had been safely deployed onto the surface of Mars using a hovering platform known as a sky crane, it was proposed that the sample-gathering lander for MSR could also be dropped off using a sky crane, which would simplify this step and reduce the overall cost of the program. The other suggestion was that the lander could be delivered to Mars via a spaceship from a commercial spaceflight company. The lander design itself could also be streamlined, and tweaks could be made to the rocket that would launch the samples back into space.
The proposals needed greater study, but everyone’s spirits were lifted by the fact these plans could, at least theoretically, get samples back in the 2030s, not the 2040s. And, crucially, “it was possible to get the cost down,” says Jack Mustard, an Earth and planetary scientist at Brown University and a member of one of the two proposal-reviewing panels. Still, it didn’t save a lot: They could do MSR for $8 billion.
“What we came up with was very reasonable, rational, much simpler,” says Christensen, who was part of the same review panel. “And $8 billion is about the right amount it would take to guarantee that it’s going to work.”
While the US became increasingly consumed with its own interplanetary woes, China was riding high.
In June 2024, the sixth installment in the Chang’e project made history. It was another lunar sample return mission, but this one did something nobody had ever done in the history of spaceflight: It landed on the difficult-to-reach, out-of-view far side of the moon and snagged samples from it.
China made it look effortless when a capsule containing matter from this previously untouched region safely landed in Inner Mongolia. Long Xiao, a planetary geoscientist at the China University of Geosciences, told reporters at the time that the mission’s success was “a cause for celebration for all humanity.”
But it was also effectively a bombshell for NASA. Yes, the moon is much closer to Earth, and it doesn’t have a spaceship-destroying atmosphere like Mars. But China was speedrunning through the race while America was largely looking the other way.
Then, in May 2025, China launched Tianwen-2. Its destination was not Mars but a near-Earth asteroid. The plan is that it will scoop up some of the space rock’s primordial pebbles later this year and deliver them back to Earth in late 2027. In light of China’s past successes, many suspect it’ll nail this project, too.
But perhaps the biggest blow to the US came in June 2025: China revealed its formal designs on returning samples from Mars—and potentially addressing the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Chinese researchers outlined a bold plan for Tianwen-3 in the journal Nature Astronomy. “Searching for signs of life, or astrobiology studies, are the first priority,” says Yuqi Qian, a lunar geologist at the University of Hong Kong. And while many observers had long been cognizant of this ambition, seeing it so clearly spelled out in academic writing made it real.
“The selection of the landing site is still ongoing,” says Li Yiliang, an astrobiologist at the University of Hong Kong, an author of the Tianwen-3 study, and a member of the spacecraft’s landing site selection team. But the paper notes, in no uncertain terms, that the mission will move at a breakneck pace. “The aim of China’s Mars sample return mission, known as Tianwen-3, is to collect at least 500g of samples from Mars and return them to Earth around 2031.”
2031. Even on its original, speedier timeline, America’s MSR plan wouldn’t get samples back by that date. So how is China planning to pull it off?
Qian explains that Tianwen-3 is building on the success of the lunar sample return program. Doing something similar for Mars is a rather giant technological leap (requiring two rockets, not one)—but, he argues, “the technologies here are similar.”
The plan is for a duet of rockets to blast off from Earth in 2028. The first will contain the lander-ascender combination, or LAC. The second is the orbiter-returner combination, or ORC. The LAC will get to Mars and deploy a lander as well as a small helicopter, which will scout promising locations around the landing site while using a claw to bring several small samples back to the lander.
The LAC will then travel to the most promising site. The lander’s drill, which can get down to around seven feet below the surface, is the most important part of the mission. At that depth, there are greater odds of capturing signs of past life. When at least 500 grams of pristine rocks have been loaded aboard the lander, the samples will be launched into space, where the orbiter will be waiting to capture them and send them back home sometime in 2031.
“The returned samples will be quarantined strictly in an under-planning facility near Hefei city,” says Yiliang. And there, in those bio-secure labs, scientists might very well find the first clear signs of alien life, past or present.
The very same month that Chinese researchers published their daring plans for returning Mars samples, the new Trump administration released a draconian NASA budget for Congress to consider—one that sparked panic across the planetary science community.
If enacted, it would have been a historic catastrophe for the venerable space agency, giving NASA its smallest budget since 1961. This would have forced it to let go of a huge number of staffers, slash its science program budget in half, and terminate 19 missions currently in operation. MSR was in the crosshairs, too.
“Grim is the word,” says Dreier of the Planetary Society.
Over the next few months, Congress pushed back on the potential gutting of NASA, but largely to save ongoing solar system exploration missions. MSR was not considered an active effort; Perseverance was effectively a scientific scout acting independently by this point. A counterproposal by the House offered up $300 million for MSR, but no policymaker was cheerleading for it. (The US Office of Management and Budget, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and the office of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation did not respond to requests for comment.)
“Mars Sample Return doesn’t seem to have very many advocates right now,” says Byrne. The project “isn’t featuring in anyone’s conversation at the moment, with all of the existential shit that’s happening to NASA.” Everyone working on a NASA mission hoped that they, and their spacecraft, would survive the onslaught. As Byrne adds: “[People are] just trying to keep their heads down.”
Researchers in America suddenly found themselves at an inflection point. “The attack on science, and the attack on NASA science, has been very successful, in that it has completely demoralized the science community,” says Christensen. “Everyone’s in a state of shock.”
When I contacted NASA in July about the state of MSR, which was then in the middle of a months-long limbo, I was told that experts weren’t available to comment. Roxana Bardan, a spokesperson, instead sent a statement: “Under President Trump’s America First agenda, NASA is committed to sustained U.S. space leadership. We will continue to innovate, explore, and excel to ensure American preeminence in space.” (The agency did not respond to a follow-up request for comment.)
That notion stood in direct contrast to what Christensen told me around the same time. “The US … has led the exploration of Mars for 50 years,” he said. “And as we approach one of the key discovery points, we’re about to concede that leadership to someone else.”
From China’s perspective, the fumbling of MSR is more confusing than anything else. “NASA has so well prepared for her MSR mission in both technology and science, and I and my colleagues have learned so much from NASA’s scientific communities,” says Yiliang.
And if China wins the race because America decided to shoot itself in the foot? “This is sad,” he says. “If this comes true, I believe the Chinese will not be that happy to win the race in this way.”
Tianwen-3 will still have to overcome many of the same hurdles as MSR. Nobody, for example, has autonomously launched a rocket of any kind off the surface of Mars. But many believe the Chinese can succeed, even at their program’s superspeed. Christensen, for one, fully expected several of their past robotic missions to the moon and Mars to fail—but “the fact that they pulled it off the first time really says a lot about their engineering capability,” he says.
Mustard agrees: “They know how to land; they know how to leave. I have a lot of confidence that they’ve learned enough from the lunar work that they’ll be able to do it.”
Plus, Tianwen-3’s architecture is simpler than the US-European mission. It has fewer components, and fewer points of potential failure. This also means, though, that the quality of the loot will be somewhat lacking. Tianwen-3 will sample from only one small patch of Mars. Conversely, Perseverance is roving around a vast and geologically diverse landscape, sampling as it goes, which would translate to “literally orders of magnitude more science than what will come from the Chinese samples,” says Christensen.
But China could serendipitously land on a biologically rich patch of the planet. As the Southwest Research Institute’s Hamilton says, the mission could “pick up something entirely unexpected and, you know, miraculous.”
The likeliest outcome is still that neither nation finds fossilized microbes, but that China brings back rocks from Mars first. At the end of the day, that’s what Americans (and Europeans) will hear: “You’re second. You lost,” says Mustard.
Like many of his colleagues, Christensen is irked by the thought of losing the race to Mars, because it would be such an own goal. The US has been sending robots over there for decades and investing billions in forging the technology that would be required to make MSR a success. And suddenly “the Chinese come along and say, Thank you very much, we’ll take all of that information—we’ll build one mission and go and do what you guys did the groundwork for,” Christensen says. “As a taxpayer, I’m like: It just seems foolish to me.”
Even the MSR skeptics concede that this kind of loss would have sweeping ramifications. Byrne worries that if something like MSR can be snuffed out so easily, what’s to say the next big mission—to Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond—won’t suffer the same ignoble fate? In other words, the death of MSR would severely damage “the ability of the planetary community to dream big,” he says. “If we don’t pull this off, what does that mean? Are we not going to do big, expensive, difficult things?”
Another big, expensive, difficult thing? Putting humans on Mars. Both critics and advocates of MSR largely agree it is an invaluable dress rehearsal. Making sure you can safely launch a rocket off Mars is a necessary prerequisite to ensuring that an array of equipment can survive for a long time on the planet’s lethal surface.
China, too, has explicitly acknowledged this. As one of the first lines of the Tianwen-3 study states, “Mars is the most promising planet for humanity’s expansion beyond Earth, with its potential for future habitability and accessible resources.”
Though such expansion is still of course a far-future dream, it’s not hard to see how losing the race here would put the US at a huge disadvantage. Members of America’s planetary science community say that to try to sway politicians in their favor, they have framed MSR as a national security issue. But they haven’t had much luck. “We’ve been in discussions with decision-makers who have never heard that perspective before,” says the Planetary Society’s Dreier.
“It is surprising that doesn’t have more weight,” adds Mustard.
Despite months of purgatory, it still stung when the coup de grâce arrived in January. In the draft for a must-pass spending bill, House and Senate appropriators spared NASA from the harshest proposed cuts, thereby saving dozens of spaceflight missions and preserving much of the agency’s planetary science output. But the bill provided absolutely zero political or financial support for MSR. There it was, in black and white: America’s plans to perform a history-making heist on Mars were dead. The bill became law in January and Perseverance, it seems, is now destined to rove alone on the Red Planet until its nuclear battery burns out.
This austere reality clashes with the soaring aspirations outlined in the first Planetary Decadal Survey, written just over two decades ago. It stated that the US exploration of the solar system “has a proud past, a productive present, and an auspicious future.” It also noted that “answers to profound questions about our origins and our future may be within our grasp.”
Now the answers have all but slipped away. Even though Perseverance continues to roam, it’s increasingly likely we’ll never see those promising bespeckled rocks with human eyes, let alone any other rocks the rover finds intriguing. It is far easier to imagine that in the near future, perhaps in the early 2030s, Perseverance will point its camera up at the night sky above Jezero Crater. It will catch a small glimmer: Tianwen-3’s orbiter, preparing to send ancient rocks back to Earth. Meanwhile, Perseverance’s own sample tubes—perhaps some containing signs of life—will be trapped on the Martian surface, gathering dust.
It is a sobering thought for Christensen. “We’ll wake up one day and go: What the hell?” he says. “How did we let this happen?”
Robin George Andrews is an award-winning science journalist and doctor of volcanoes based in London. He regularly writes about the Earth, space, and planetary sciences, and is the author of two critically acclaimed books: Super Volcanoes (2021) and How to Kill An Asteroid (2024).
