After Russia’s Exit From the Lunar Gateway, NASA Has Found a New Partner in UAE
upstart writes:
The United Arab Emirates is a founding member of the Artemis Accords:
Relations between NASA and Russia's state-owned space corporation were fairly robust five years ago when the two parties signed a joint statement that discussed partnering on the development of a space station orbiting the Moon, called the Lunar Gateway. At the time, Russia's Roscosmos was expected to provide an airlock for the facility.
[...] By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the country had already pivoted toward working with China on an "International Lunar Research Station." This is a parallel effort to NASA's Artemis program, which invites countries to join China and Russia to cooperate on exploration of the Moon.
While Russia was drifting away from NASA, nearly two dozen countries have signed multilateral agreements to join NASA's Artemis Accords. One of the founding member nations, the United Arab Emirates, is looking to take its participation further. On Tuesday, The National reported that the UAE is in discussions with NASA to provide an airlock for the Lunar Gateway. The small Middle Eastern nation has been working with Boeing on designs.
[...] The Islamic nation, which is smaller in area than the US state of Maine, has a population of just about 9 million people. However, it has expressed an outsize interest in space exploration. In June 2020, through a partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, the UAE's space program sent the "Hope" probe to Mars to study the red planet's atmosphere. UAE officials said the goal of this program was to inspire its younger generation to go into science, technology, engineering, and medicine. At the time, only Russia, the United States, the European Union, and India had successfully put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars.
[...] Through its partnership in the Artemis Accords, UAE is positioning itself to send an astronaut to the Lunar Gateway later this decade-and perhaps to the Moon's surface in the 2030s.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.