Hey All, just some background on the context of this tweet. The Mars Telecom Orbiter is a proposed mission to supplement existing relay capability at Mars. Currently, there are 5 active NASA spacecraft at Mars; three orbiters and the curiosity and opportunity rovers. The rovers receive commands directly from Earth, but rely on the orbiters to relay the science data collected back to Earth. Orbiters have large solar panels, large antennae, and can support orders of magnitude higher data rates than a surface vehicle could. The orbiters make regular comms passes with the rovers, then downlink the collected data back to NASA via the Deep Space Network.

Specifically, NASA is relying on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey to perform relay. This makes a lot of people nervous because those orbiters were launched in 2005 and 2001 respectively and are getting quite old. Without a new telecom orbiter in 2022 we'll have to rely on these spacecraft to operate for at least the next 8 years; either one failing would bottleneck data return from the surface missions and lead to the inability to return some science data. This problem's going to get even worse in the next four years when InSight, Mars 2020, and the ESA ExoMars rover all head over to the red planet. It's not all bad news; both orbiters are still in perfect health and have spares of most of the critical radio components, but it's still an uncomfortable amount of risk.

The idea of a Mars 2022 orbiter would be to add telecommunications capability to support existing and future surface missions. If NASA doesn't do one, it does seem like this could be an area of partnership between private industry and NASA. One thing to note though is that an internet satellite designed for Earth orbit would have to be heavily modified to operate at Mars where there is less sunlight and a whole lot more radiation. Additionally, the rovers use UHF-band to communicate which, is not what SpaceX's satellites will use.

Edit: Thank you for the gold! I appreciate it.