Europe Built a Mars Rover. America Decides Whether It Flies.

Twenty-five years after it was first conceived, Europe's Mars rover finally has a ride to the Red Planet — and it is not a European rocket.

Rosalind Franklin, the rover ESA built to drill deeper than any previous Mars mission, is scheduled to launch in late 2028 on SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A. The mission's destination is Oxia Planum, a flat plain rich in ancient clay deposits where liquid water once pooled. Its payload includes a two-meter drill — the first capable of reaching material buried below the Martian surface that has been shielded from radiation and perchlorates for billions of years.

The launch announcement is new. The launch vehicle is new. The geopolitical backstory is not.

The project was conceived in 2001 under ESA's Aurora Programme, then redesigned after NASA dropped out in 2012. Russia stepped in, providing the launch vehicle and lander. That partnership lasted until February 2022, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine ended ESA's cooperation with Roscosmos. The rover was complete. The launch vehicle was gone.

What followed was a two-year scramble. ESA contracted Airbus in Stevenage, UK to redesign the lander. In early 2024, NASA and ESA signed a Memorandum of Understanding formalizing American support for the mission. Under the ROSA project — Rosalind Franklin Support and Augmentation — NASA agreed to provide the launch service, braking engines for the lander, radioisotope heater units to keep the rover's electronics alive through Martian nights, and a mass spectrometer for the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer instrument.

This means the mission that was supposed to prove European strategic autonomy in deep space is now structurally dependent on American hardware. Europe built the rover. Everything that gets it to Mars — the rocket, the landing brakes, the heaters, the spectrometer — comes from the United States. The Planetary Society estimates 82 NASA missions faced cancellation risk under the Trump administration's latest budget proposal. Congress rejected the cuts. ROSA survived.

The radioisotope heater units are worth noting separately. Pu-238 heat sources are not commercially available. Only the United States currently produces flight-qualified units at scale. Every future European or commercial Mars mission that needs to survive Martian night will eventually need to ask Washington for the same thing. That dependency is baked into the thermal engineering of interplanetary exploration and invisible in most coverage.

Rosalind Franklin's two-meter drill sets it apart from every predecessor. Perseverance, NASA's newest rover, cored samples from just below the surface. Curiosity's drill reached about five centimeters. The radiation environment on Mars' surface destroys organic molecules over millions of years. Two meters of regolith provides shielding that surface sampling cannot. Whether the clay formations at Oxia Planum contain preserved biosignatures is an open question — but Rosalind Franklin will be the first rover with the reach to find out.

The launch window targets late 2028. The estimated landing is NET 2029. The mission has survived a Russian invasion, three presidential budget proposals, and twenty-five years of schedule slips. Whether it survives the remaining 34 months intact is the only question that matters now.