NASA officials outline plans for building a Lunar Gateway in the mid-2020s

Enlarge / Artist's concept of initial configuration of the Lunar Gateway. (credit: NASA)

The concept of NASA's Lunar Gateway-a small outpost to be built in a halo orbit around the Moon-is about five years old.

Although a lunar space station might serve many useful purposes, the concept came about for one basic reason. Due to limitations in the upper stage of NASA's Space Launch System rocket and an under-powered propulsion system in the Orion spacecraft, these vehicles do not have enough performance to get astronauts into low-lunar orbit, and then back out of it again for a return to Earth. Thus, NASA came up with a waypoint farther from the Moon and not so deep within its gravity well.

For more than a year, as NASA has developed its Artemis plan to return humans to the Moon by 2024, the space agency has positioned Gateway as the "Command Module" where it would aggregate components of a Human Landing System and from where astronauts would descend down to the surface of the Moon.

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