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NASA wants to bring rock samples back from Mars. And they’re turning to Rocket Lab to make it happen.
What’s happening:
- Rocket Lab (NASDAQ: RKLB) has been selected by NASA to leverage their space technology to retrieve rock samples from Mars and bring them back to Earth for the first time ever
Why it matters:
- If successful, this mission could unlock a new level of understanding around Mars and potentially even help provide insight into whether life has ever existed on Mars or not
- NASA has been forming plans for a long time around landing human explorers on Mars, which this new study could also provide meaningful new scientific data around the potential feasibility of doing
Going deeper:
- This is not the first time Rocket Lab has collaborated closely with NASA, previously supplying them with two twin satellites as part of the NASA ESCAPADE mission
- Rocket Lab has also been pushing the boundaries of disruption and innovation in space recently through their collaboration with Varda Space, who has been using Rocket Lab’s Pioneer spacecraft to be able to leverage microgravity in orbit for new breakthroughs in drug discovery and biotechnology
The intrigue:
- Space companies wanting to extract natural resources from the Moon has been slowly becoming a new trend in venture capital, with Reddit (NYSE: RDDT) co-founder Alexis Ohanian previously leading the seed round for space startup Interlune who is aiming to extract Helium-3 from lunar soil
