Schmidt's rocket gets a Mars job

In mid-June NASA handed its next Mars science mission to a rocket company that has never put anything in orbit. The deal: NASA builds four instruments to map Martian winds, dust, and temperature for the first time; Relativity Space supplies the spacecraft and the rocket and gets it to Mars, under the agency's first six-year reimbursable partnership. The orbiter, Aeolus, is slated for 2028.

The instruments come from NASA, the spacecraft and the ride from Relativity — the agency's first six-year reimbursable deal.

The company is Eric Schmidt's. The former Google chief took control of Relativity in early 2025 after it had struggled to raise money — its one vehicle, Terran R, has yet to fly and its debut keeps sliding toward 2027. So the credibility gap is the whole story: a firm with zero orbital flights is now NASA's ride to another planet, on Schmidt's personal conviction and a NASA willing to bet on a name.

The thesis that travels with Schmidt's space buying — that he wants rockets to loft solar-powered AI data centers and undercut a strained electric grid — is worth setting aside. It is reporter inference from his public warnings about AI's power appetite, not a Relativity program; the company has announced no such constellation. And the arithmetic already cuts against it: rivals peg compute in orbit at roughly three times the cost per watt of the terrestrial kind. The concrete thing Schmidt is actually flying is a NASA Mars mission — a slower, stranger bet than a data center, and a real one.