Three months ago, during an eye-catching event at its Washington, DC, headquarters, NASA announced which was shifting the focus of its lunar plans from an orbital space station to a surface lunar base.
As part of this, officials said work on the Lunar Gateway planned to orbit the Moon would be suspended. Of the two elements that were most advanced, NASA also revealed that one of them, the Power and Propulsion Element,would be reused to serve as a core module for a demonstration of nuclear-electric propulsion in deep space.
Less was said about the fate of the other major component, the Housing and Logistics Outpost (HALO). This is the large pressurized module, 6.1 meters long, that visiting astronauts would spend most of their time in when visiting the Lunar Gateway. NASA has awarded contracts worth $1.1 billion to Northrop Grumman to design, build and integrate the habitation module with the power and propulsion element.
After NASA’s announcements in March, Northrop Grumman began lobbying NASA and others to include the HALO module as part of NASA’s Lunar Base plans. However, Ars has learned that this is unlikely to happen.
Last week, a key contractor for the HALO module, Paragon Space Development Corp., was told to stop working on the space vehicle, two sources told Ars. In 2022, Paragon received a contract worth more than $100 million. develop life support system for HALO.
