NASA says it is building a gateway to the moon – critics say it's just a door

It's the year 2026. A veteran astronaut, Nicole Mann, leads his crew of four through a hatch Orion spacecraft on a small space station near the moon. Inside, it feels like something new. Outside, everything is splendor. Below the station, half of the moon reflects the sunlight: glittering, silvery and silent. The depths of the space darken the other half of the orb. In the distance, a blue and green Earth also bathes in the glow of the Sun. The cradle of humanity and its future among the stars share the perspective.

Mann, 49, who uses the "Duke" code, begins a series of communication checks. There is a delay of two seconds before Mission Control responds with cheers and highlights. For decades after Apollo, humans had remained confined to low Earth orbit. No more. After Mann's crew has spent a dozen days manning the new "Gateway" orbiting the Moon, NASA will finally have a new presence in deep space. From there, humans can soon descend to the lunar surface or make the final preparations for Mars missions.

Such a future scenario, at least, is what the space agency wants Congress, the White House and the American public to envision when they envision a lunar space station, which NASA is proposing to build in the United States. 2020. "I think of it as a port in space, a dry dock for the activities that come and go," said Jason Crusan, a senior NASA head of headquarters overseeing the development of the bridge.

Over the past three years, Crusan and other NASA human exploration officials have quietly tweaked the bridge plans and, perhaps more importantly, developed a rationale for the construction of the bridge. outpost near the Moon. Until now, their plan has worked. Vice President Mike Pence approved the gateway, as did NASA's new director, Jim Bridenstine.

"Given the current budgets, there is no other architecture that has been presented to me," Bridenstine told Ars. "And so I came to the conclusion that the gateway is the right approach."

NASA has also captured the lion's share of aerospace contractors and their vast lobbying armies by offering contracts for six different designs for the Gateway's Habitat module. In addition, agency officials have repeatedly stated that they would invite commercial companies such as SpaceX to deliver shipments and provide other services to the station. Almost everyone has a reasonable chance of getting some of the Gateway action.

This did not leave much oxygen in the room to the dissidents, at least publicly. However, some critics persist and raise valid questions about the Lunar Gateway. Robert Zubrin, a high-level aerospace engineer outside of NASA's policy-making process, has become a chief antagonist.

"This is the next giant step in quicksand," Zubrin said at a recent meeting of the Mars Society. "If you wanted to send people to the Moon or Mars, would you take some of your money to build a space station in lunar orbit? You would not want to. "

Zubrin and others claim that the bridge is not intended to facilitate NASA's move to the Moon or Mars, but rather to provide a destination for the agency's expensive rocket, space launch system and Orion spacecraft. These vehicles, built for NASA by major aerospace companies with hundreds of contractors across the country, are currently unable to travel to the moon or Mars. Combined, they are not powerful enough. NASA has struggled for a good part of the decade to find something to do. And after wandering in the wild, agency leaders finally opted for the Gateway concept.

"Let's be honest about it," Zubrin said of NASA's human exploration plans. "It's not a specific program, it's a vendor-based program. Imagine that you run your business to satisfy your suppliers. "

Getting to Gateway

There is no need to regurgitate decades of space policy history to understand why NASA is now adopting the development of a lunar gateway that will cost at least $ 10 billion and almost certainly several times more. Still, a little background helps.

The brief summary is as follows: In 2004, George W. Bush wanted to send humans back to the moon and Mars. NASA engineers, led by administrator Mike Griffin, responded by designing a large and expensive system to achieve this, which has never been properly funded. When Barack Obama became president, he canceled the human return to the moon because he was unfortunately late and unaffordable, and the president called for the cancellation of Griffin's large rocket and spacecraft. Mistrusting the lost jobs and institutional knowledge of NASA, Congress strongly rejected Obama. While the Moon was out of the table, NASA was told to build a large rocket, now redesigned as a space launch system, and continue with the Orion spacecraft.

This left a big problem. What to do with SLS and Orion? Critics have come to call the SLS "rocket to nowhere," because NASA had no obvious need for it. Of course, the rocket and the spaceship could fly around the moon, in a rehearsal of NASA's Apollo 8 mission in 1968, but it could not land in another world with gravity.

Eventually, the Obama administration solved this problem with a new destination, suggested by a group of experts known as the Augustine commission. "From here 2025, we expect that new spacecraft designed for long journeys will allow us to undertake the first crew missions beyond the Moon in space." far away, "said Obama at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. an asteroid for the first time in history. "

At first, it seemed like a great idea. An asteroid offered a new destination and presented the crucial advantage of a shallow gravity well. NASA could go without having to build expensive landing gear and climbing vehicles, which it could not afford because of the huge costs of SLS and Orion (over $ 3 billion a year).

Unfortunately, after a few years of research, scientists have not found an asteroid fitted close enough to Earth that astronauts could reach it quickly because the Orion vehicle could only support a crew that for 21 days in the deep space. NASA concluded that it lacked the budget and tools to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 – or really, for a long or long date.

Towards the middle of the decade, the agency's intelligent engineers devised a plan that was both feasible and technically compliant with the president's goal of visiting an asteroid by 2025. Though elegant the mission was somewhat misleading. The "Asteroid Redirection Mission" asked the agency to fly a robotic spaceship into the solar system, to take a rock the size of an SUV on the surface of the aircraft. an asteroid and bring it back to the vicinity of the moon. The astronauts would then visit it in 2025 via Orion. It was clear that this mission would be canceled well before Obama left the White House.

As a result, about three years ago, with NASA spending the most $ 20 billion to develop SLS and Orion, the agency still needed something to do with these vehicles.

Over time, the Johnson Space Center's engineers, along with the contribution of other centers, have designed the Lunar Gateway. Why not? NASA already knew how to design and build a space station, as it had done with the International Space Station. The new outpost could be placed far enough away from the Moon's gravity well so that SLS and Orion could be used to build the bridge, and NASA would be guaranteed an annual launch of SLS rockets of 30 to 60 people. missions of the day

The bridge has solved the political and technical problems of NASA. Therefore, while the mission of the asteroid was dying early, the death was unceremonious, the door went up. This plan provided legions of NASA subcontractors with something to work on, and the bridge elements could be designed so that only the SLS and its much lower, though less powerful, loading capacity could deliver them. in lunar orbit.

All NASA engineers had to do it now to find practical use.

Image of the list by NASA