NASA awards contract to Northrop Grumman to build Gateway module

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NASA has awarded a $935 million contract to Northrop Grumman to build and integrate the first Lunar Gateway housing unit.

NASA announced on July 9 that it had completed a contract with Northrop Grumman to build a housing unit and a central outpost (HALO) for the gateway. This module, one of the Gateway’s first modules, will serve as home to visiting astronauts and a command center for the lunar-orbiting facility. It will have docking ports for Orion spaceships, cargo vehicles such as SpaceX’s Dragon XL and moon landing, as well as later units to be added by international partners.

HALO is based on the Cygnus spacecraft used by Northrop Grumman to carry cargo to the International Space Station, but has been extensively modified with docking ports, enhanced life support and other new subsystems. “By leveraging our active Cygnus production line, Northrop Grumman is uniquely able to provide an affordable, reliable HALO module in the timeframe needed to support NASA’s Artemis program,” said Steve Keren, Northrop Grumman’s vice president of civil and commercial satellites. statement.

The company’s fixed-price contract covers the assembly of HALO as well as its integration with another gateway module, the Maxar Built Power and Propulsion Element (PPE). Northrop will also be contractually responsible for preparing the compact modules for launch on the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, as well as for post-launch activation and towing of HALO.

“This action sets the final contract element for a diverse and multifaceted team — distributed across the country and within certain international partner facilities — working together to create and implement the initial Gateway capability,” John Olansen, NASA’s HALO project manager, said in an agency statement.

NASA has been working with Northrop Grumman on HALO for nearly two years under a series of contracts worth more than $1.1 billion. In July 2019, NASA said in a purchase order that it would issue a single-source contract to Northrop Grumman for a housing unit based on work the company had done under the Next Space Technologies Award for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) dating back to 2016. Northrop Grumman was one of Six companies have received NextSTEP Awards for housing studies, but NASA concluded that Northrop was the only company whose design would be ready to meet the March 2019 deadline of 2024 to return humans to the lunar surface.

NASA then issued a contract worth $187 million in June 2020 to cover work on HALO through an initial design review. That review, at the time the contract was announced, was due to take place at the end of 2020 but didn’t take place until May.

Over the past two years, the portal’s plans have changed. NASA originally proposed launching the PPE and HALO separately, then docking them into a near-straight linear orbit that the Gateway would use. In 2020, NASA changed course and concluded that combining the two elements on Earth and launching them on a single vehicle would save the cost of a single launch as well as reduce complexity.

However, these changing plans have led to increased cost and technical problems for the gateway, according to a November 2020 report from NASA’s Office of Inspector General. He also warned that with launch no later than May 2024, PPE and HALO will no longer be available. In a position to support an Artemis 3 lunar landing mission, if such a mission is held according to the 2024 schedule as the agency planned at the time.

The release of portal units has declined further. In NASA’s announcement of the contract, the agency said PPE and HALO will launch aboard the Falcon Heavy in November 2024. NASA has not updated the Artemis 3 mission schedule, and the agency previously said the Orion spacecraft could dock directly with the lunar lander – SpaceX’s Starship, if NASA contract awarded in April resists protests submitted to the Government Accountability Office — in a near-straight corona orbit, rather than using the portal.

However, the agency still expects to use the Gateway as a staging area for future lunar landing missions as part of a “sustainable” subsequent phase of lunar exploration. “NASA is building the infrastructure to expand human exploration in the solar system more than ever before, including Gateway, the lunar space station that will help us make inspiring scientific discoveries on and around the moon,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in the statement. . “HALO is a critical component of Gateway, and today’s exciting announcement brings us one step closer to landing American boots on both the Moon and Mars.”

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