The lunar Gateway space station is an international collaboration led by NASA with Europe, Japan and Canada.
What will the future space station that orbit the Moon look like? NASA has shared a good range of photographs in which we can appreciate what the structure of this “home away from home” will be for the astronauts who will travel in SpaceX’s Orion spacecraft. The first astronauts will dock with the Gateway and two of them will travel from the space station to the lunar surface in a SpaceX spacecraft and stay there for a week.
The orbiting laboratory will have a four-person capacity, where NASA will work with some existing International Space Station partners, including Europe, Japan and Canada.
Much of the station will have a docking port for the SpaceX Starship lunar lander.
Lunar Gateway is a crucial part of the Artemis missions, in which it is intended to get the first woman and the next man on the moon by 2024, although it is a date that could be delayed.
Most of the Artemis mission, including the Gateway, will be sent to the Moon using NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket, which is still in development, but will be ready for its first test flight later this year or early. the next, in 2022.
Artemis Program
The first manned mission will be called Artemis 3, and it will take up to four astronauts to lunar orbit in the Orion capsule, where they will dock with the Gateway. Starship will be waiting, docked to the Gateway, to receive two crew members for the final leg of the journey to the surface of the Moon. The idea is for Gateway to be the go-between, but for the initial mission Orion could dock directly with Starship. Then , the astronauts would spend a week on the Moon before returning to lunar orbit and then bringing Orion back to Earth.
The objective
NASA wants to go back and establish a sustainable presence on the Moon, complete with a lunar space station, to test new technologies that will pave the way for a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s. NASA hopes to launch the first components of the Gateway to 2024, although it is unclear how long it will take to fully develop the space station so that it can act as a temporary home and science center for astronauts traveling to and from the Moon. As was the case with the International Space Station at the time, Gateway is likely to receive new hardware and perhaps new modules as time goes by and expands.
And Russia?
Although NASA had initially planned to work with Russia on this project, the latter announced that it would partner with China instead. So Russia and China will work on their own lunar space station or perhaps a base on the moon’s surface. The exact details are unknown, at the moment.
