By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, March 24 (Reuters) – NASA announced on Tuesday it has canceled plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and will instead use components from the project to build a $20 billion base on the moon’s surface, while also planning to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars.
U.S. space agency chief Jared Isaacman, an appointee of President Donald Trump who took charge at NASA in December, announced an array of changes to the Artemis moon program including an aim to send more robotic landers to the moon and lay the groundwork for using nuclear power on the lunar surface.
NASA also disclosed plans to launch a spacecraft called Space Reactor 1 Freedom to Mars before the end of 2028 in a mission it said would demonstrate advanced nuclear electric propulsion in deep space. NASA called this a major step forward in bringing nuclear power and propulsion from the laboratory to space. NASA said the spacecraft, once it reaches Earth’s planetary neighbor, will deploy helicopters for exploring Mars.
The Lunar Gateway station, largely already built with contractors Northrop Grumman and Intuitive Machines subsidiary Lanteris Space Systems, was meant to be a space station in a lunar orbit.
“It should not really surprise anyone that we are pausing Gateway in its current form and focusing on infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the lunar surface,” Isaacman told a crowd of foreign delegates, companies and journalists at a day-long event at NASA’s headquarters in Washington.
Repurposing Lunar Gateway to create a base on the moon’s surface – a difficult undertaking – leaves uncertain the future roles of Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency in the Artemis program, three key NASA partners that had agreed to provide components for the orbital station.
“Despite some of the very real hardware and schedule challenges, we can repurpose equipment and international partner commitments to support surface and other program objectives,” Isaacman said.
European Space Agency chief Josef Aschbacher, who attended the event, told Reuters he will study the new plans and continue talking to NASA about them.
Lunar Gateway was designed to serve as both a research platform and a transfer station that astronauts would use to board the moon landers before descending to the lunar surface. NASA’s current plans call for landing astronauts on the moon’s surface in 2028.
The changes made by Isaacman in recent weeks on the flagship U.S. moon program are reshaping billions of dollars worth of contracts under the Artemis umbrella, sending companies scrambling to accommodate the extra U.S. urgency as China makes progress toward its own planned 2030 moon landing.
Central to the Artemis program is its astronaut lunar lander program, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin both racing to develop moon landers for NASA. The two companies, each targeting an initial crewed landing on the moon in 2028, have fallen behind schedule.
The Artemis program, begun in 2017 during Trump’s first term as president, envisions regular lunar missions as NASA’s long-awaited follow-up to its first moon missions in the Apollo program that ended in 1972.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Jan Harvey)
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