NASA is cancelling plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and \u200bwill instead use its components to construct a $20 billion \u200cbase on the moon\u2019s surface over the next seven years, its new chief Jared Isaacman said on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Isaacman, who was sworn in at the agency \u200bin December, made the announcement at the opening of a \u200bday-long event at NASA\u2019s Washington headquarters at which he \u2060outlined a raft of changes he is making to the agency\u2019s \u200bflagship moon program Artemis.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt should not really surprise anyone that we \u200bare pausing Gateway in its current form and focusing on infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the lunar surface,\u201d Isaacman told delegates at the event.<\/p>\n
The \u200bLunar Gateway station, largely already built with contractors Northrop Grumman and \u200bVantor, formerly Maxar, was meant to be a space station parked in a \u200clunar \u2060orbit. Repurposing the craft for a lunar surface base is not simple.<\/p>\n
\u201cDespite some of the very real hardware and schedule challenges, we can repurpose equipment and international partner commitments to support surface and \u200bother program objectives,\u201d \u200bIsaacman said.<\/p>\n
Lunar \u2060Gateway was designed to serve as both a research platform and a transfer station that astronauts would \u200buse to board the moon landers before descending \u200bto the \u2060lunar surface.<\/p>\n
The changes imposed by Isaacman on the flagship U.S. moon program in recent weeks are reshaping billions of dollars worth of contracts \u2060under \u200bthe Artemis effort.<\/p>\n
That is sending companies \u200bscrambling to accommodate the extra urgency as China makes progress toward its own 2030 moon \u200blanding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA is cancelling plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and \u200bwill instead use its components…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355971,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":["post-355970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}