Thales Alenia completes the habitable module for Lunar Gateway
The Italian company Thales Alenia last week announced it has completed construction and testing of the hull for the habitable module for Lunar Gateway, and is now preparing it for shipment to the U.S. for final outfitting.
HALO’s (Habitation and Logistics Outpost) primary structure is ready to be packaged for shipment to the United States. After successfully completing a series of environmental tests in Thales Alenia Space’s plant of Turin, Italy, HALO’s pressurized structure, built by our company, will be delivered to Gilbert, Arizona, where prime contractor Northrop Grumman will complete its outfitting ahead of launch to lunar orbit with Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element.
Thales Alenia also builds the hull for Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus capsule, from which HALO was based. HALO is longer however, and has three docking ports for the attachment of Gateway’s other modules.
The press release at the link appears mostly designed to tout Gateway and Thales Alenia’s major contribution to it, which also includes building the airlock for the United Arab Emirates. The company also has European Space Agency contracts to build a lunar lander for delivering cargo to the Moon as well as a habitat for use on the Moon. All of these projects are presently threatened with major changes should the Trump administration decides to cancel SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway.
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The Italian company Thales Alenia last week announced it has completed construction and testing of the hull for the habitable module for Lunar Gateway, and is now preparing it for shipment to the U.S. for final outfitting.
HALO’s (Habitation and Logistics Outpost) primary structure is ready to be packaged for shipment to the United States. After successfully completing a series of environmental tests in Thales Alenia Space’s plant of Turin, Italy, HALO’s pressurized structure, built by our company, will be delivered to Gilbert, Arizona, where prime contractor Northrop Grumman will complete its outfitting ahead of launch to lunar orbit with Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element.
Thales Alenia also builds the hull for Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus capsule, from which HALO was based. HALO is longer however, and has three docking ports for the attachment of Gateway’s other modules.
The press release at the link appears mostly designed to tout Gateway and Thales Alenia’s major contribution to it, which also includes building the airlock for the United Arab Emirates. The company also has European Space Agency contracts to build a lunar lander for delivering cargo to the Moon as well as a habitat for use on the Moon. All of these projects are presently threatened with major changes should the Trump administration decides to cancel SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Always love the obligatory “HLS government reference concept shown.” Must be so embarrassing for everyone involved (except SpaceX) that Starship HLS is way bigger than the entire Gateway complex. And, it’s upsetting for the artists because they’d have to make everything else really tiny to fit in the graphic. :)
With all the talk about cutting SLS, this is the first I heard about cutting Gateway. Of course, if you kill SLS you kill Gateway. Looking at the assembly diagram/launch list, I know that Falcon Heavy is hauling up the Halo module, and the rest will be hauled up on SLSs: Artemis IV – VII. If SLS is cancelled, I am sure these modules could be used in LEO or sold to a private company.
Jay: I have raised this fact repeatedly since November that if you cancel SLS, you drive a stake through Lunar Gateway. Are you not reading my posts?
Just asking. :o
There’s no reason to kill Gateway just because you kill SLS. There’s nothing on the station that can’t be launched by a Falcon Heavy.
Patrick Underwood,
I don’t think it’s just Starship HLS that would make Gateway look dinky. I think it would look only modestly less so with Blue Origin’s Blue Moon 2 in the picture. Gateway, as planned, is simply, and irretrievably, dinky. Also expensive and useless.
mkent,
I suppose one could launch the elements of Gateway on Falcon Heavies but it’s my understanding that these modules have no capability to rendezvous and self-assemble. The Orions that are supposed to accompany these modules when launched on SLS are also supposed to latch onto them, pull them free of the SLS upper stage and then steer them into position for docking with the rest of Gateway. That won’t be possible if SLS is canceled unless a second FH is allocated to get an Orion out to Gateway to handle these chores. Granted that even a fully-expended pair of FHs would cost less than 10% of a single SLS, but Orions, individually, also cost way more than a pair of throw-away FHs.
This seems an awful lot of trouble and expense to go to just to wind up with a dinky little barely-occupied “space station” in a problematical orbit. If SLS goes – and I think it will – Orion and Gateway should be axed at the same time. Get back to the Moon with reusable SpaceX or partly reusable Blue Origin hardware and put off building any sort of lunar-orbiting space station until a proper large rad-armored and rotating one – or more – is needed to serve as an R&R location for long-term lunar residents.
As things stand now, that’s correct. Only PPE/HALO will have LOI and maneuvering capability.
Two modified Starships could do the same job.
But then again two modified Starships could just land on the moon and set up a base. A third could have just extra fuel for a return trip. Scavenge all the left over fuel from the first two ships.
You could even modify the fuel tanks before launch to have man sized doors in them to make turning them into living and working space easier.
The engines could even be removed and turned into assent vehicles for either cargo or emergency return to Earth orbit. Or even into Lunar hoppers to get around the moon faster and further.
Give Gateway to ESA! It’s already practically a sop thrown to them anyway. I’m sure they’d be happy to take over management, launch procurement, and in-space assembly. /s
Jay wrote: “Of course, if you kill SLS you kill Gateway.”
My recollection is that NASA had the Gateway concept before the Artemis lunar mission. I seem to remember that “Gateway” meant it was to be the way to get to the rest of the solar system. I don’t recall the reasoning, but I suspect that NASA intended to use the Oberth effect* (a modification to the gravity assist “slingshot” maneuver**) during the close pass of the Moon as a way to reduce the propellant needed and increase the science payload to the rest of the solar system.
I have never been convinced that Gateway ever made any real sense, but then no advocate ever explained the reasoning to me. Is it economical, in that it saves money or time in the long run? Does it really get enough more payload to various destinations to pay for itself? Is Congress really willing to increase the number of solar system probes to make this a worthwhile endeavor?
Even for manned missions it does not make that much sense. The orbital period adds a week to any manned mission to the Moon, and it may add another week to the return trip. Either way, it limits the launches of flights to the Moon (or to the rest of the solar system) to every two weeks, at best. The reason it was used for Artemis is that SLS is not strong enough to match the Apollo profile of the low lunar orbit rendezvous technique, so the Artemis rendezvous takes place in high lunar orbit and the lander does most of the work within the lunar gravity well.
The only positive side that I see for Gateway is that it allows NASA to claim an increase in space capabilities, orbiting a part-time space station around another world, despite SLS’s decrease in launch capability from the Saturn V.
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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
Edward: If my memory serves me right, Gateway was originally a concept put forth by Lockheed Martin to justify both SLS and Orion, after those projects were under way.
In other words, it was created to give these boondoggles a goal and destination, and had no real purpose related to establishing a lunar base or exploring the solar system.
NASA latched onto it for the same reason.
Robert,
That might mean that it was associated with the Asteroid Redirect (Retrieval) Mission to bring an asteroid to lunar orbit for study using the Orion spacecraft. ARM came about when someone finally figured out that Orion couldn’t go to an asteroid, as Obama had proposed, so someone thought of brining an asteroid to Orion. Eventually, NASA realized that they couldn’t redirect (retrieve) anything larger than a nice sized boulder. Usually, mission creep moves in the other direction, from something small to something way far outside the original scope, but under Obama it kept moving to smaller and smaller objectives.
Geez. No wonder NASA was so adrift under Obama. Other than making muslims appreciate their contributions to science (although no one has yet to discover even one contribution), NASA had no real direction from the President, and SLS-Orion had no mission.
Poor Lockheed Martin. Here they are, two decades downrange of signing their Orion contract, and it still hasn’t flown a single human being and has only flown twice, all because the rocket that is supposed launch it took so long to make, and still takes so long to make that it is years between launches. Then there is the part where NASA directed the company to swap out a perfectly good heat shield for one that doesn’t work right. Well, at least it is a cost-plus project, so they aren’t losing money on it. They might not have lost money on it, but we taxpayers don’t seem to be getting our money’s worth with Orion, with SLS, or with Gateway. Maybe Jared Isaacman can direct NASA into some good goals and missions.
Edward wrote: “That might mean that it was associated with the Asteroid Redirect (Retrieval) Mission to bring an asteroid to lunar orbit for study using the Orion spacecraft.”
Yes! I forgot about that Obama fakery. That asteroid mission was always a joke, from day one, but yes, it was part of the effort to find some goal for SLS/Orion.