Cislunar Outpost Update: NASA Pushes Forward With Plans for Cislunar Space Station
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is intent on pressing forward with their plans to build a cislunar "gateway" outpost for future human missions despite the uncertainty regarding potential policy changes under the Trump administration.
In fact, decisions about how the outpost will be developed are expected to be announced in the coming months, according to SpaceNews.
Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, recently spoke at the American Astronautical Society's Goddard Memorial Symposium about their plans for the cislunar outpost. He said that he was studying concepts for launching the primary elements of the planned cislunar outpost as secondary payloads on the early flights of the Space Launch System (SLS).
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According to Gerstenmaier, "there's starting to be a sense of urgency" in selecting what equipment will be loaded on those initial SLS missions which will aid in the development of the proposed outpost.
"We've really got to start making some decisions about what that cargo is, whom we partner with and how we build the equipment," Gerstenmaier said. "You're going to see us, over the next several months, starting to make some pretty crisp decisions about what goes on those flights."
The cislunar outpost — meaning it is located in the space between the earth and the moon — will be built for the purpose of holding a collection of habitation, cargo as well as other modules that would be able to support crews who are working in lunar orbit or somewhere else in cislunar space for extended periods of time.
The crew would have to be ferried to and from the outpost by the Orion spacecraft. While at the outpost, these astronauts could test technologies as well as perform various tasks required to help in fulfilling NASA's long-term plans for the human exploration of Mars in the 2030s.
The development of the cislunar outpost could begin with the deployment of the second and third SLS missions — the EM-2 and the EM-3. These will be the first flights of the SLS that will utilize the more powerful Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) and will be able to carry secondary payloads as heavy as several thousand kilograms.
