We modern humans have gotten used, a long time ago, to having space stations in orbit around our world. The near future will bring an even bigger number of them, spinning at various heights above the planet’s surface, and we’re mostly cool with that too. But can you imagine a human space station, occupied and floating around some other celestial body?
That’s what NASA and its partners plan to do with the Gateway, a future space station meant to support our efforts of colonizing the Moon and ultimately allow us to play our endgame, a crewed trip to Mars.
Talk of the Gateway first surfaced about four years ago, at a time when NASA was just getting started with the Artemis program. Running in parallel with the successor of the Apollo program, the Gateway should start coming together in space about one year before Artemis III sets down on the Moon, in 2024.
The project is coming together with the help of pretty much everyone who’s anyone in space exploration. SpaceX will launch the station’s elements and will build the logistics module, Maxar will be making the power and propulsion element (PPE), Northrop Grumman, ESA and JAXA are tasked with the habitation and logistic outpost (HALO), and NASA will use the Artemis Orion to take astronauts to and from the space station.
Several renderings of how the Gateway is supposed to look have made it our way over the past four years, but if we’re not mistaken, this is the first time we get a full-blown animation of how the station is supposed to operate.
It was not put together by NASA or any of its partners, but by a specialist that calls himself Hazegrayart. It shows the station in orbit around the Moon, a spacecraft carrying the SpaceX Human Landing System (HLS) arriving, and several incredible angles of both the Moon and the hardware.
You can enjoy all the action of the over 4-minute clip below.
Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies. Full profile
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