'If there is a space race, China's already winning it': NASA unlikely to bring Mars samples back to Earth before China does, experts say

A rendering of the Perseverance Rover on the surface of Mars with a sealed sample on the ground.

What if the first Martian rock samples ever deliberately hauled back to Earth landed not in Houston, but in Beijing?

That scenario, once far-fetched, is edging closer to reality. The U.S.-led Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission — long flagged as a top priority in planetary science and designed as the capstone to the Perseverance rover's carefully-curated cache of geological samples scooped from Mars' Jezero Crater — has stalled.