Space News by Jeff Foust — March 13, 2020
A revised plan for returning astronauts to the surface of the moon by 2024 will no longer rely on the use of a lunar Gateway, although NASA’s human spaceflight head says the agency is still committed to eventually developing it.
In a conversation with the NASA Advisory Council’s science committee March 13, Doug Loverro, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said he had been working to “de-risk†the Artemis program to focus primarily on the mandatory activities needed to achieve the 2024 landing goal.
He noted that, in the Apollo program, it took the lunar lander program six and a half years to go from contract signing to the Apollo 11 landing. By contrast, NASA has less than five years before the current deadline. “What are we going to do to go ahead and make that happen? And the answer is you’ve got to go ahead and remove all the things that add to program risk along the way,†he said.
More:
https://spacenews.com/nasa-takes-gateway-off-the-critical-path-for-2024-lunar-return/
