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The Lunar Gateway gets a lot of flack for being a part of how SLS and Orion budgets ballooned because of the requirements to build/operate the Gateway steps, bu

The Lunar Gateway gets a lot of flack for being a part of how SLS and Orion budgets ballooned because of the requirements to build/operate the Gateway steps, but Gateway is also under-appreciated for how much it was trying to do in terms of giving us new scientific reasons to visit the moon. It's polar orbit would give us a platform for some interesting scientific studies of the moon that weren't possible with Saturn/Apollo. It would also be a place to test our knowledge gained from maintaining a human presence in ISS further out from LEO and further away from easy repairs. It's certainly easy to dislike Gateway or think it was wasteful, but it was also driving the scientific ambitions of the whole project, and pushing SLS to not just be a worse Saturn V and Orion to not just be Apollo 2: Electric Boogaloo (and pushing competitors like SpaceX and Blue Origin to try for some of those same high-minded, scientifically ambitious requirements).

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> It would also be a place to test our knowledge gained from maintaining a human presence in ISS further out from LEO and further away from easy repairs Yup. The Moon is a laboratory for advancing our understanding of low-gravity colonisation. We don’t, for example, know how to do trauma medicine in space, accommodate anyone who isn’t in perfect physique or sustainably grow food. That said, you don’t need a gateway to do that science. Just a Moon base.
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  Sure, but Gateway Nasa can build a lot faster than Moon base using now institutional knowledge from ISS modules for bootstrap. Nasa and its collaborators have built one ISS already. To date no one has built a moon base yet. Even in (harder) science fiction, a station like Gateway is almost always a first step towards building a first moon base, because orbiting in a bunch of cramped Apollo-style "command modules" is a bit silly if you can build a mini-hotel waystation with a shared orbit instead and in theory save on extra modules. The Apollo-style was considered wasteful in the long term at the time, too, it was just easier and faster in the short term. The predictions that Apollo would not lead to a continued presence on or even near the Moon were rather right on the nose. We did the short term version once already, I can't fault Nasa for trying to do the real long term route if we're going back. (Because yeah, let's go back for good, this time.)

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> It would also be a place to test our knowledge gained from maintaining a human presence in ISS further out from LEO and further away from easy repairs Yup. The Moon is a laboratory for advancing our understanding of low-gravity colonisation. We don’t, for example, know how to do trauma medicine in space, accommodate anyone who isn’t in perfect physique or sustainably grow food. That said, you don’t need a gateway to do that science. Just a Moon base.

WorldMaker 1y ago
Sure, but Gateway Nasa can build a lot faster than Moon base using now institutional knowledge from ISS modules for bootstrap. Nasa and its collaborators have built one ISS already. To date no one has built a moon base yet. Even in (harder) science fiction, a station like Gateway is almost always a first step towards building a first moon base, because orbiting in a bunch of cramped Apollo-style "command modules" is a bit silly if you can build a mini-hotel waystation with a shared orbit instead and in theory save on extra modules. The Apollo-style was considered wasteful in the long term at the time, too, it was just easier and faster in the short term. The predictions that Apollo would not lead to a continued presence on or even near the Moon were rather right on the nose. We did the short term version once already, I can't fault Nasa for trying to do the real long term route if we're going back. (Because yeah, let's go back for good, this time.)