Journey To Mars: NASA Plans To Build A Pit Stop Around The Moon
May 12th, 2017: NASA has been teasing the "Journey to mars" for quite some time now. The recent pressure from Trump administration indicates that we could see this Journey soon. This week NASA sat down the media and decided to provide more details on its plans for the future. NASA's roadmap of the future has a huge pit stop near the moon, on the way to Mars.
While addressing the Humans to Mars summit in Washington D.C, Greg Williams from NASA revealed the exact plans NASA has for its pit stop near the moon. The Space agency plans on building a small space station that will orbit the moon in what is known as a cislunar orbit. This space station will serve as a "Deep Space Gateway" for ships that are preparing for longer journeys.
According to the statement given by Greg Williams - "It will be "a transportation node for us in cislunar space that we can use to mount expeditions to Mars. It will allow us also to gain confidence that we can conduct deep space operations ... in an environment that is going to be more similar to the long transit to Mars."
According to Greg Williams, the gateway will be designed to dock with the Orion Spacecraft and support a crew of at least 4 people for up to a month. NASA has planned a series of launches that will be required before 2026 in order to build the space station up in the cislunar space.
Greg Williams further went on to explain that "If we can conduct a year-long crewed mission on this Deep Space Transport in cislunar space, we believe we will know enough and have enough confidence that we can then send this thing, crewed, on a thousand-day mission to the Mars system and back"
It is not only NASA that is participating in the race to Mars, SpaceX and Mars One hope to put people up there on the red planet sooner than the others. All the meanwhile China and Russia prepare for a Mars landing in the 2040s.
