Lunar Gateway

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A small crewed space station planned for a near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon, intended as a staging point where Artemis crews arriving in Orion would meet landers, and as the programme's principal international partnership: NASA supplying the Power and Propulsion Element and the HALO habitat, ESA a habitat module and a refuelling and communications element, JAXA batteries and life-support hardware, Canada the Canadarm3 robotic arm and the UAE an airlock. The orbit was chosen for near-continuous Earth communications, low station-keeping cost and access to the whole lunar surface including the poles. Maxar's Power and Propulsion Element and Northrop Grumman's HALO — whose pressure shell was built by Thales Alenia Space in Italy and delivered in 2025 — were completed but never launched. On 24 March 2026 NASA announced it was pausing Gateway in its current form and redirecting funding toward lunar surface infrastructure, with completed hardware potentially repurposed. The decision carries unresolved consequences for the international partners who had committed elements.

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