Nasa Punts Decision on Mars Sample Return to Next Administration

Except, no, Starship is already hugely behind schedule when it comes to promises made for the Artemis program alone, and the design of Artemis has massive compromises to account for Starship (up to a dozen or more Starship launches for a single trip to the moon), which also requires SpaceX to come up with a solution for in-orbit refueling (which they don't yet have, and has never been demonstrated, and by all accounts SpaceX appears to be unreasonably optimistic about the shelf-life of rocket fuel in a hypothetical orbital depot, which is a huge risk to the feasibility of Artemis). In the meantime, Starship has limited independent economic prospects because the world just doesn't have the demand for that much launch capacity, and there's no reason to think that Starship will be more economical for the vast majority of launches (for the same reason that the vast majority of commercial airline flights are not on jumbo jets). SpaceX's mercurial leadership represents an existential risk to the entire company by working on the wrong things and making unrealistic promises that they have no clue how to fulfill, for the same reason that Tesla's mercurial leadership represents an existential risk to the entire company by working on the wrong things (cough, cybertruck, cough) and making unrealistic promises that they have no clue how to fulfill (cough, camera-only autonomous vehicles, cough).