America was winning the race to find Martian life. Then China jumped in.

Two messages were encoded on the 70-foot parachute used by the Perseverance rover as it descended toward Mars. This annotated image shows how NASA systems engineer Ian Clark used a binary code to spell out “Dare Mighty Things” in the orange and white strips; he also included the GPS coordinates for the mission’s headquarters at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“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.

two labelled vials of soil next to a small ruler for scale — China brought back soil samples from the moon’s Ocean of Storms during its Chang’e-5 mission, marking the first time since 1976 that samples had been returned from the moon.

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.

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