NASA announced Tuesday it may turn to Elon Musk's SpaceX or Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin to help reduce the soaring costs of returning Martian rocks collected by the Perseverance rover to Earth.

Stay tuned. Crews at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station are gearing up for a busy January, including SpaceX Starlink internet satellite missions, Blue Origin's maiden flight of the mighty New Glenn rocket, and the NASA-SpaceX Blue Ghost moon lander mission.

NASA and the European Space Agency are planning to return some of these precious rock samples to Earth, the culmination of a decades-long dream to retrieve pristine rocks from Mars. The ambitious, multi-billion-dollar effort,

NASA announced Tuesday it may turn to Elon Musk's SpaceX or Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin to help reduce the soaring costs of returning Martian rocks collected by the Perseverance rover to Earth.