NASA will shelve its plan for a small lunar space station in favor of building a base directly on the moon.
For years, the U.S. space agency talked up Gateway, a station that would circle the moon and act as both a lab and pit stop for lunar missions. Now, after another hard look at time, money, and logistics, officials say executing that project would only slow them down on the way to the main event: getting astronauts back on the moon — before China beats them to it.
As NASA prepares to launch Artemis II, a 10-day crewed flight around the moon that could lift off as early as Wednesday, April 1, agency leaders are overhauling the moon-landing missions that will follow it, trying to ensure the first boots in the dust since 1972 are American. That means sticking a landing during the Artemis IV mission in 2028.
But as for NASA’s time crunch for the moon base, that part is largely self-inflicted. A target of 2030 for installing the first pieces of the astronaut habitat stemmed from Gateway plans the agency sold to stakeholders years ago. To keep the date, the agency says it must skip the space station — the project that helped establish the timeline in the first place.
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