NASA's next Mars orbiter won't be built by NASA — a private company will own it

Space 4 min 80 sources

Relativity Space will build and fly the next Mars orbiter in 2028, with NASA contributing instruments and buying the data. It's a different model — and it lands the same week NASA retires MAVEN, its old fully-owned orbiter.

Key takeaways

NASA's next Mars orbiter will be built and owned by a private company, Relativity Space, with NASA contributing instruments and buying the data — a break from sixty years of NASA building its own spacecraft.
The orbiter is designed first as a communications relay, data store, and AI-compute platform, with the science instruments riding along — because a relay can be sold and pure science can't.
It arrives the same week NASA retired MAVEN, the old fully-public Mars orbiter, marking a shift from missions funded for knowledge to missions funded by what they can earn.

The next spacecraft NASA sends to orbit Mars won’t belong to NASA. On June 17, Relativity Space announced it will build, launch, and operate a Mars science orbiter in late 2028 — privately funded, privately owned. NASA’s role is to contribute two instruments and to buy the data that comes back. [1][2]

It’s a quiet announcement with a loud meaning. For sixty years, the model was simple: NASA designs the spacecraft, NASA pays for it, NASA owns it. This is something else. And it arrived the same week NASA said farewell to MAVEN, the orbiter built the old way. [3]

What Relativity is building

The mission is the first under what Relativity calls its Interplanetary Sciences Program. The spacecraft will carry an atmospheric-profiling instrument suite from NASA’s Ames Research Center and a radar to map ice and rock below the Martian surface. [1]

But the science instruments are passengers. The orbiter’s main job is to be a node — a relay in the sky. It will provide high-bandwidth laser and radio links back to Earth, and radio contact with whatever lands on the surface below. Relativity says it will also carry “massive” data storage and “server-class compute” — enough to run AI models in Mars orbit. [1]

The company didn’t disclose the spacecraft’s size, mass, or cost. A source told SpaceNews that an undisclosed philanthropic organisation is helping fund it. [1] Eric Schmidt — former Google chief, now Relativity’s executive chairman, who has reportedly invested heavily in the company — framed it as a step toward making “access to space more open, reliable and routine.” [1][2]

It would launch on Terran R, Relativity’s reusable rocket, which has been in development for years and hasn’t flown yet. [1] That matters: the whole plan rests on a vehicle that doesn’t exist in flying form.

Why the science rides in the back

Look at what the orbiter is, in order of emphasis: a communications relay, a data centre, an AI platform — and, also, a science mission. That ordering isn’t an accident. [1]

A pure science orbiter is hard to make pay. It collects data, sends it home, and the value is knowledge — which doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. But a relay-and-compute platform in Mars orbit can be sold: to NASA for its surface rovers, to future commercial landers, to anyone who needs a connection home. The science instruments hitch a ride on a backbone built for paying customers. [1]

This isn’t bad. It might be the only way the next Mars orbiter gets built at all, given that NASA’s science budget is under pressure. But it’s worth seeing plainly: when a private company funds the mission, the mission bends toward what earns. [1]

The old model, retired the same week

The contrast is sharp because MAVEN just ended. NASA officially began decommissioning the orbiter after losing contact in December 2025 during a routine blackout behind Mars. Controllers spent months trying to wake it — sending reboot commands into silence — before giving up. [3]

MAVEN was the old model in full. NASA conceived it, funded it, owned it, ran it for eleven years. It transformed how scientists understand how Mars lost its atmosphere, and became one of the agency’s most valuable assets at the planet. One team member said the end felt like “the loss of a loved one.” [3]

It was a mission whose only job was to learn. No relay business, no compute-for-rent. Just science, paid for by the public because the public decided the knowledge was worth it. That model is now the expensive exception, and the Relativity announcement is what’s stepping into the gap. [1][3]

The wider shift

Relativity isn’t alone. Astrobotic unveiled its Griffin-1 lunar lander for a NASA Moon-base mission this week, and is being acquired by Voyager to scale up. [4][5] The pattern is the same: private companies build the hardware, NASA buys the service.

Money is pouring in to make it possible. SpaceX’s bankers are preparing a bond offering of at least $20 billion to fund its AI-and-data-centre expansion — though its newly public shares slipped this week as the post-IPO frenzy cooled. [6][7] The capital is real, and it is shaping what gets built.

For an ordinary person, the thread is this: the spacecraft going to Mars in 2028 will exist because someone found a way to make Mars orbit pay. The science is real and will get done. But it now arrives bundled inside a business — and that bundle is the price of the ticket. [1]

02 · Lesson · why it matters

The thing only gets built when someone makes it pay — and that changes what it is

Money doesn't just fund a project. It quietly rewrites what the project is allowed to be — and the part that can't pay for itself ends up riding in the back.

Two Mars orbiters, one week, two different worlds

This week NASA said goodbye to MAVEN and hello to its replacement — and the two could not be more different in why they exist.

MAVEN was built the old way. NASA designed it, the public paid for it, and its only job was to learn how Mars lost its air. No side business. No customers. Eleven years of pure science, funded because a society decided the knowledge was worth the cost.

Its replacement, announced the same week, is built by a private company that will own it. The science instruments are real. But they ride on a spacecraft designed first to be a relay, a data store, and an AI platform — things that can be sold. The knowledge is now a passenger on a vehicle built for paying customers.

Nobody did anything wrong here. But something changed shape, and it’s worth learning to see.

The pattern: funding bends design

Here is the thing to carry past Mars: how a thing is paid for quietly decides what the thing becomes.

A pure science orbiter is hard to fund, because its product is understanding — and understanding doesn’t appear on anyone’s balance sheet. So in a world where the public purse is tight, the way to get it built is to wrap it in something that earns: a communications relay, a compute platform, a service NASA can buy by the byte.

The moment money has to come from a customer instead of a society, the design starts answering to the customer. Not all at once, not crudely. The science still happens. But the order of priorities flips. What pays leads; what only teaches follows.

You can watch this everywhere once you know the shape. A bridge gets built where the tolls will cover it, not where the need is greatest. A drug gets developed for the disease the rich can pay to treat. A free app survives by selling your attention, because attention is what pays. The thing exists — but in the form the money allowed, not the form the need asked for.

The part that can’t pay rides in the back

This is the quiet cost, and it’s easy to miss because nothing visibly breaks.

When the relay pays the bills, the relay gets the power budget, the prime real estate on the spacecraft, the design attention. The science instrument takes what’s left. If a choice ever comes down to “more compute for customers” versus “a sharper look at the Martian ice,” the funding model has already cast its vote before anyone sits down to decide.

So the question to ask of any built thing isn’t only “is it good?” It’s “what part of this couldn’t pay for itself — and what happened to that part?” The answer is usually: it got smaller, or it got bundled, or it didn’t get built at all. The pure version, the one that only had to be worth knowing, becomes the expensive exception. MAVEN is now that exception. Its kind is getting rarer.

You are paying for this too, in a way you can’t see

Here is where you sit inside it, far from Mars.

You will never touch this orbiter. But you live inside the same machine. The roads near you exist where the funding penciled out, not where the need was sharpest. The research that reaches you got done because it could pay — and the research that couldn’t is the silence you’ll never notice, because absent things don’t announce themselves. Your weather forecast, your GPS, your medicine: each is the shape that some funding model allowed, not the shape a clean want would have drawn.

None of this means the private orbiter is wrong, or that public funding is pure. Public money has its own pressures and its own blind spots. The point is humbler than that. Whenever you see a thing that got built, you’re seeing a compromise between what was needed and what could pay — and the seam between them is invisible unless you go looking. From any single seat — the scientist’s, the investor’s, the taxpayer’s, yours — you only see part of it.

That’s the whole, and the whole is hard to hold. The next time something useful appears in the world, it’s worth a second thought: who needed this, who paid for it, and which one shaped it more. You won’t always be able to tell. But knowing the question is there keeps your certainty about how the world is built a little more honest — and a little more humble.

03 · Lab · your turn

Fund the Mars Orbiter

Split a fixed budget between parts that earn and a science instrument that only teaches, and feel how the mission flies only when earning dominates and the science shrinks.

04 · Hope · carry this

The science still gets done — that's the quiet good news. People keep finding ways to fund the work of understanding, even when it has to ride along inside something that pays, and the questions worth asking outlast whoever happens to be footing the bill.