Three months ago, during a flashy event at its Washington, D.C., headquarters, NASA announced it was shifting the focus of its 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, planned to orbit the Moon, would be halted. Of the two elements that were farthest away, NASA also revealed that one of them – the power and propulsion element – will be reused to serve as a core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space.
Less was said about the fate of the other key component, the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO). It is a large pressurized module, 6.1 meters long, in which the visiting astronauts will spend most of their time while visiting the Lunar Gateway. NASA has awarded a $1.1 billion contract to Northrop Grumman to design, build and integrate the habitation module with power and propulsion elements.
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. However, Arce has learned that this is no longer likely to happen.
Last week, Paragon Space Development Corp., a prime contractor for the HALO module, was told to stop working on the space vehicle, two sources told Ars. In 2022, Paragon received a contract worth more than $100 million to develop life-support systems for HALO.
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