NASA’s goal for sending people to Mars has always been equal parts ambitious, and equal parts unclear. The agency’s “Journey to Mars” plan was a general illustration of broad milestones that needed to be achieved in order to get to the red planet successfully, but there is not much in the way of details — and that’s made it incredibly hard for most people to get behind NASA’s plan.
Last week, however, NASA finally delivered some specific details behind the type of technologies that will be essential not just to getting to Mars, but allowing humans to create a permanent presence out in cis-lunar space (the region between the moon and Earth), and facilitate the the ability to travel out into more deep space worlds as the century moves forward.
Meet the Deep Space Gateway and the Deep Space Transport: two architectures that NASA intends to utilize as in order to send crews out into farther regions of the solar system. During last week’s meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, William Gerstenmaier, the associate administrator for human exploration and operations (HEO) at NASA, outlined what the DSG and DST are supposed to be, and how — combined with the Orion spacecraft and extremely powerful Space Launch System — they’re supposed to give deep spaceflight for astronauts a incredible boost forward in the next several decades.
“It’s not a single program nor a single mission,” Gersetenmaier told the NAC attendees. “It’s an infrastructure we can use…it’s essentially a framework anyone can use.”
That last part is key: what NASA is trying to do with the DSG and DST is not just further its own deep space exploration aims, but also help further the ambitions of its international and private sector partners, like the European Space Agency and SpaceX. NASA isn’t simply creating a system for
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