![]() The Gateway, which won't begin to be launched to lunar orbit until the mid-2020s, will orbit the moon and serve as a jumping off point for missions to the surface and later to Mars. Lockheed Martin at KSC, for instance, has finalized its version of the astronaut module that could go on the Gateway, one of the six companies under contract by NASA to do so. "We have seen what happens when we, as NASA in low Earth orbit, become one customer of many customers in a robust commercial marketplace," said Bridenstine, speaking of SpaceX's recent success testing its astronaut capsule on a mission to the International Space Station.Ĭommercial partnerships will also be a major part of the development of Gateway, a lunar ISS of sorts. Among them are Lockheed Martin, which has drawn up plans for a lander that could transport up to four astronauts to the lunar surface, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, which also has plans for a "large lunar lander" called "Blue Moon." "We are funding human-rated landers to go to the moon for the first time in over 10 years," Bridenstine said.Ĭommercial partnerships are a major part of driving down costs for NASA-and companies are already responding to that call. The budget calls for $363 million to support commercial development of a large lunar lander to carry cargo, and then astronauts, to the surface of the moon. The focus for 2020 follows Trump's Space Policy Directive 1, which instructed NASA to return astronauts to the moon-and eventually Mars. Overall, the budget proposal is about $500 million short of what the space agency got in 2019, but it represents a $283 million, or 1.4 percent, increase from the 2019 estimate. We need to make spaceflight more available to more people," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said as he presented what he called a "strong" budget request from President Donald Trump's administration. ![]() That plan will hinge on one concept: reusability. Setting the stage were the Orion capsule, the first crewed mission of the long-awaited spacecraft-and its heavy-lift rocket counterpart-that have long been central to the agency's lunar plans.īut in NASA's 2020 budget, Orion and the rocket, called the Space Launch System, will be a smaller part of its plans, as NASA shifts to put a greater focus on the other components that will get American footprints back on the lunar surface. NASA revealed its $21 billion budget request for the 2020 fiscal year at an event at Kennedy Space Center on Monday afternoon.
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