Nasa to start building lunar ‘gateway’ space station soon
Platform orbiting moon should be finished by 2025 and will act as a staging area for Mars and deep space missions
Nasa’s goal of returning to the moon should see a major push in early 2019, when the agency awards its first contract for the lunar “gateway” programme.
Nasa’s first spending for the platform will be for power and propulsion elements early next year, followed by habitation components, Associate Administrator William Gerstenmaier said on Thursday at the Space Symposium conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado. They will probably be launched moonward, in that order, starting in 2022.
The platform should be orbiting the moon in 2025, said Gerstenmaier, a 41-year Nasa veteran who oversees human exploration and operations. It will carry a four-astronaut crew on 30-day missions, he said.
The gateway would also further Nasa’s goal of another human landing on the moon and will help determine whether water near the surface could be used to manufacture propellant for deep-space missions. The moon’s gravity could also help a spacecraft reduce the blistering speeds used for six-month voyages back and forth to Mars, thus easing re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere.