Three months ago, during a brilliant event at his headquarters in Washington, D.C., NASA announced it shifts the focus of lunar plans from an orbital space station to a lunar base on the surface.
As part of this, officials said work on the Lunar Gateway, which is scheduled to launch into lunar orbit, will be suspended. Of the two most distant elements, NASA has also revealed that one of them is the Element of Power and Motion.would be reassigned to serve as the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space.
Less has been said about the fate of another key component, the Housing and Logistics Outpost (HALO). It is a large pressurized module, 6.1 meters long, in which astronauts spent most of their time visiting the Lunar Gateway. NASA has awarded contracts worth $1.1 billion to Northrop Grumman to design, build and integrate the habitable module with the Power and Propulsion Element.
Following NASA’s announcements in March, Northrop Grumman began lobbying NASA and others to include the HALO module as part of NASA’s Moon Base plans. But Ars has learned that won’t happen.
Paragon Space Development Corp., the HALO module’s prime contractor, was told last week to stop work on the spacecraft, two sources told Ars. In 2022, Paragon received a contract worth more than $100 million to develop a life support system For HALO.
