Arthur J. Villasanta – Fourth Estate Contributor
Washington, DC, United States (4E) – NASA has begun the process of selecting contractors to build the “Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway,” (LOP-G), a manned cislunar space station that will be the jumping-off point for manned and unmanned spaceflights to Mars and beyond.
Formerly known as the Deep Space Gateway, the space station project will also see the participation of the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities (Roscosmos).
LOP-G will be used as a staging point for the Deep Space Transport (DST), also called Mars Transit Vehicle, which is a crewed interplanetary spacecraft for science exploration missions to Mars lasting up to 1,000 days. DST will consist of two elements: an Orion capsule and a propelled habitation module. DST will depart and return from LOP-G to be serviced and reused for Mars missions. A team of four astronauts will inhabit LOP-G at any one time.
NASA will eventually build the habitable components of LOP-G and should be able to launch to orbit these components around the Moon by 2022. NASA plans to have LOP-G fully orbital by 2025. LOP-G will enable astronauts to accomplish their missions within a 30-day period. These missions include deep space explorations and Moon landings.
NASA will first fund the space station’s power and propulsion elements in 2019, followed by habitation components, said Associate Administrator William Gerstenmaier. They will probably be launched moonward, in that order, starting in 2022.
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