NASA Awards Contract to Launch Initial Elements for Lunar Outpost

NASA has selected SpaceX of Hawthorne, Calif., to provide launch services for the agency’s Power and Propulsion Element and Habitation and Logistics Outpost, the foundational elements of the “Gateway” — the first long-term orbiting outpost around the Moon.

The Gateway is critical to supporting sustainable astronaut missions under the agency’s Artemis program.

After integration on Earth, the two elemets of the Gateway are expected to launch together no earlier than May 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The total cost to NASA is approximately $331.8 million, including the launch service and other mission-related costs.

The Power and Propulsion Element is a 60-kilowatt class solar electric propulsion spacecraft that also will provide power, high-speed communications, attitude control, and the capability to move the Gateway to different lunar orbits, providing more access to the Moon’s surface than ever before.

The Habitation and Logistics Outpost is the pressurized living quarters where astronauts who visit the Gateway on their way to the Moon will work.

It will provide command and control and serve as the docking hub for the outpost. HALO will support science investigations, distribute power, provide communications for visiting vehicles and lunar surface expeditions, and supplement the life support systems aboard Orion, NASA’s spacecraft that will deliver Artemis astronauts to the Gateway.

About one-sixth the size of the International Space Station, the Gateway will function as a way station, located tens of thousands of miles at its farthest distance from the lunar surface, in a near-rectilinear halo orbit.

It will serve as a rendezvous point for Artemis astronauts traveling to lunar orbit aboard Orion prior to transit to low-lunar orbit and the surface of the Moon. From this vantage, NASA and its international and commercial partners will conduct unprecedented deep space science and technology investigations.

NASA’s Launch Services Program at Kennedy will manage the SpaceX launch service.

The HALO is being designed and built by Northrop Grumman Space Systems of Dulles, Va., and the PPE is being built by Maxar Technologies of Westminster, Colo.

NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston manages the Gateway program for the agency. NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland is responsible for management of the PPE.