European Space Agency finalises plans to ‘explore the moon properly’

October 11, 2020

European space officials will this week unveil detailed plans for a series of ambitious missions aimed at returning humans to the moon in the next few years.

Projects will include construction of crew quarters for an orbiting lunar space station, making the power and propulsion units for America’s Orion spacecraft, and designing and building a sophisticated communication and refuelling unit, known as Esprit, to serve astronauts on the lunar surface.

Planning for the programme – known as Gateway – has been going on for years, but now final contracts with European aerospace companies are about to be signed and will be announced at this week’s International Astronautical Congress. “The decisions have been made and now the lunar spaceport is go,” said David Parker, head of robotics for the European Space Agency (Esa) and a key figure in the Gateway programme.

The aim of the Gateway programme is to open up the moon to scientific scrutiny in the same way that Antarctica was opened up in the second half of the last century. “The moon is like an eighth continent,” Parker said. “It’s an astronomical museum that has been soaking up the history of our solar system for more than 4 billion years.

The aim of the programme was to get the first astronauts to the moon by 2024, he added. “That is a challenging deadline, but we are up for it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/10/european-space-agency-finalises-plans-to-explore-the-moon-properly