This is John Batchel, a conversation with colleague Eric Berger of Ars Technica about NASA's need to launch soon enough a new communication satellite for linkage with Mars, for the rover's in extant and for the experiments going in, the lab work, all of the probes.

What are they going to choose for the builder of the

satellite and for the booster? Curtin number three. Here's Eric to explain the challenge.

Well, I think it's just the fact that you want a young spacecraft there that you're, you know,

you're pretty confident it's going to survive for another, you know, for more than five years or so. So really the question is, is, you know,

you have this pot of money and what could you get for it? If you were to award a bespoke

mission to Lockheed Martin like you've done in the past, you'd get a great spacecraft,

but it would cost a full $700 million. Some of the commercial providers, particularly Rocket Lab and especially Blue Origin,

are offering potentially more capable missions for less money.

Blue Origin is talking about using its Blue Ring spacecraft,

and you could actually do a lot of really interesting things with that

for less than $700 million.

So that's the debate NASA is having right now.