Lacking the necessary performance to safely place Orion and its astronauts into the Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) optimal for a new round of crewed Moon landings, Orion/ESM on its own is limited to higher, more exotic lunar orbits with less immediate value. Weighed down by an extremely inefficient European Service Module (ESM), NASA couldn’t use Orion to replicate its famous Apollo Moon missions if it wanted to. Loosely known as Gateway, NASA and a few of its ‘centers’ have been floating the concept for years – partially on its merits as a potential platform to dip toes into crewed deep spaceflight and explore the Moon but mostly as a way to give the bloated Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft a destination for destination’s sake. Days after SpaceX won a NASA contract to launch a galaxy-mapping space telescope, the space agency has selected Falcon Heavy to launch a small space station to the Moon some four years from now.
0 kommentar(er)
