Inside Nasa’s floating Gateway Moon base from where astronauts will make daring 2030s missions to dark lunar South Pole

NASA is preparing to launch a floating space station built to orbit around the Moon.

The Lunar Gateway is meant to act as a space home and science lab – and serve as a base for astronauts to make trips to the Moon’s surface.

Nasa says it’ll be “the first permanent infrastructure at the Moon”.

And it’s designed to be a key part of Nasa’s Artemis missions to return humans to the lunar surface.

With the Apollo missions, Nasa simply dropped astronauts straight onto the Moon.

But Nasa says having the Gateway orbiting the Moon will allow for longer stays on and around our rocky space neighbour.

It’s around a fifth of the size of the International Space Station, and will orbit the Moon at speeds up to two miles per second.

The 63-ton station will be around 141 x 62 x 67 feet and can house four astronauts.

And it’ll be orbiting anywhere from 1,000 miles above the Moon at its closest approach to as far away as 43,500 miles.

It’s difficult to say exactly when Nasa will put the Gateway into orbit as space launches don’t always go to plan.

But Nasa says it’ll have a “minimum 15-year lifespan” once it’s up there – with the “potential for extension”.

Nasa says it’ll need at least four rocket launches to get the parts for Gateway into space.

And that process of launching and assembling it in orbit “will take approximately six years”.

That might sound like a long time, but it’s far less than the 13 years and 42 flights it took to build the ISS.

The first two modules are expected to arrive ahead of the Artemis VI mission.

This is the second crewed lunar landing mission in the Artemis program, expected to take place in 2028.

Then the Lunar I-Hab will reach the Moon “no earlier than 2028” as part of that mission.

It’s during that mission that astronauts will enter the space station for the first time.

And the plan is that astronauts will use the Gateway to descend to the Moon’s surface.

“Gateway’s unique polar orbit will provide Artemis astronauts and their spacecraft access to the entire lunar surface,” Nasa explains.

“Including the critical lunar South Pole region which is the focus of the Artemis missions.

“It will also ensure uninterrupted communications between the Moon and Earth, provide unique scientific opportunities within the deep space environment, and its high stability will enhance operational efficiency and reduce costs.”

The Gateway will be made up several different parts.

There’s the Lunar I-Hab, which is a living quarters with life-support systems and cameras.

You’ve also got the Orion spacecraft that shuttles astronauts from Earth to the Gateway and back.

Then there’s HALO, which is also a habitation module with life-support systems, fire-detection and suppression, and a moon comms system called Lunar Link.

There’s also an area called the Lunar View, which contains fuel tanks but also giant windows for astronauts to capture “stunning images” of the Earth and Moon, according to Nasa.

Nasa is currently testing mock-ups of Gateway modules to see if they work as intended.

This included a trial of the Lunar I-Hab module in Turin, Italy in the summer of 2024.