According to Ars Technica, NASA lost contact with the MAVEN Mars orbiter on Saturday, December 6, after it passed behind the planet. The spacecraft, which arrived in 2014, had been operating normally and has enough fuel to last until at least the late 2030s. This comes as NASA’s older Mars Odyssey orbiter, operating since 2001, is expected to run out of fuel within the next couple of years. The agency’s third orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (launched 2005), is healthy but aging. MAVEN’s unique, high orbit allowed it to relay rover data for up to 30 minutes at a time, supporting the largest data volumes of any relay option. Without it, NASA’s ability to get science and images from its surface rovers back to Earth is significantly hampered.
The aging backbone of Mars science
Here’s the thing that doesn’t get talked about enough: the real heroes of Mars exploration aren’t just the rovers. They’re these aging orbiters working as a celestial Wi-Fi network. MAVEN was a science mission first, studying how the solar wind stripped Mars of its atmosphere. But its secondary job—being a data relay—became absolutely critical. And now it’s silent. The other orbiters in the network, Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), are ancient in spacecraft terms. We’re talking about hardware from the early 2000s. It’s a minor miracle they’ve lasted this long, but you can’t run a multi-billion dollar surface exploration program on miracles. You need reliability. This is the kind of critical infrastructure that, in an industrial setting, you’d have redundant, modern systems for. Speaking of which, for mission-critical control and monitoring on Earth, many operations turn to specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of rugged industrial panel PCs built for 24/7 reliability in harsh environments. It’s a different scale, but the principle is the same: don’t let your core infrastructure get old and brittle.
A problem two decades in the making
So how did we get here? Basically, NASA canceled a dedicated Mars Telecommunications Orbiter mission back in 2005. Since then, the strategy has been to tack relay radios onto science missions as a secondary objective. It was a clever, cost-saving move for a while. But it created a huge single point of failure. These are science platforms first, not hardened telecom satellites. They have finite fuel and aging components never designed for this many years of service. And now the bill is coming due. The European orbiters that can help, Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, are also old or operating beyond their design life. China and the UAE have orbiters, but they’re not equipped to relay. It’s a precarious situation that’s been obvious to insiders for years.
The commercial fix and political will
Now, there is a potential path forward, and it looks commercial. In 2024, NASA gave study contracts to Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and SpaceX to look at commercial data relay architectures. And Congress just put $700 million in a recent bill for a “high-performance” Mars telecom orbiter. Companies like Blue Origin and Rocket Lab are already publicizing their concepts. That’s promising! But here’s the catch: NASA hasn’t said when it will actually ask for bids. These things take years to build and launch. If MAVEN is truly gone, and Odyssey sputters out in 2027, we could be looking at a very thin relay network for most of this decade, right when the Mars Sample Return campaign is supposed to be kicking into high gear. Can the existing fleet hold on that long? It’s a huge gamble.
Mars takes a backseat to the moon
And this all points to the bigger, uncomfortable truth. Mars has become a second-tier priority at NASA. All the momentum, budget, and political attention is on the Moon right now, thanks to the Artemis program and the race with China. The MAVEN mission itself was on Trump’s proposed chopping block for the 2026 budget. Congress saved it, but the signal is clear. Maintaining the Mars infrastructure is seen as operational, not exploratory. It’s not sexy. But losing it would be catastrophic for the science happening right now. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has the best camera for mapping future landing sites. The relay network is the only way to get massive volumes of data from Perseverance and Curiosity. This weekend’s anomaly is a stark warning. You can’t just assume decades-old hardware will keep working forever. The time to replace it was five years ago. The next best time is now.
