What Do We Do With All Those Gateway Pieces?
Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) departure and arrival
Location: Italy
Date: March 2025
Photo Credit: Thales Alenia Space
Keith’s note: Now that NASA has been told to cancel Gateway what happens to all its pieces? Social media is full of speculation: Halo as a Mars lifeboat; PPE as part of a lunar or Mars relay; building some portion of Gateway and sending it to Mars as part of a sprint human effort. And what happens to all the international partners who trusted America and threw in billions to build parts – and the whole Artemis Accords thing? Did anyone put any reasons or strategic thought into this?
9 responses to “What Do We Do With All Those Gateway Pieces?”
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Use them to repair and upgrade the ISS? Reverse course and build Gateway anyway? Auction it?
I cannot fathom a strategy aside from a malign desire to utterly sabotage the American civilian space program. Quite clearly a desire to put resources into a modernized SDI and expand the Space Force is more of a priority, hence the seemingly strange desire to make Greenland one of several new states of the United States.
Canada may block road access to Alaska, but that is merely added expense and what we in Europe now call the US mafiosi style leadership has no rationale to attack another nation and a former ally such as Denmark – whose people bled for US in its wars.
It’s more than a little premature to put Gateway on eBay. It’s quite surprising that so few people see the PBR as similar to the Tariffs which have, frankly, changed faster than a Falcon 9 landing. I think we should wait for the new administrator to be approved by the Senate before we start imagining scenarios that do not accomplish anything close to the current schedule for Americans landing on the moon.
The head of FEMA was just fired for disagreeing with the White House efforts to cut FEMA’s budget. The new NASA Administrator is not going to have a whole lot to say about this. That is how things now work here in Washington, DC.
Cowards, all of them.
The budget always changes between the PBR and what is actually passed as law by Congress. What’s different here is he’s realized even if Congress appropriates money for Gateway he can just fire everyone who works on Gateway and call it a day. If Congress will not enforce the law that stops him from unilaterally impounding appropriated money, then he basically has unilateral control over spending.
The budget is likely to pass, US congress has by its do-nothing attitude demonstrated that it is in the US administration pocket.
Well since the commercial space companies are ramping up, auction the hardware to the highest commercial bidder.
Lunar cycler