MARCH 18, 2020 BY MATT WILLIAMS

The Lunar Gateway is No Longer a Required Part of the Artemis Mission to Return to the Moon by 2024

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As Lovarro explained, this means focusing on technologies and activities that NASA already has experience developing. He also stated that those risks that can’t be eliminated need to be “burned down”. All of this is essential, he claimed, to creating the necessary mission architecture to land astronauts on the Moon by 2024. As he summarized:

“What are we going to do to go ahead and make that happen? And the answer is you’ve got to go ahead and remove all the things that add to program risk along the way.

“What are all of the risks that can get in our way in a four-and-a-half-year schedule and how do we go ahead and pull them all early into program, or eliminate them from the program altogether by going ahead and making wise technical or programmatic choices?”

For this reason, he said during the latter half of the session, the Lunar Gateway had to be removed as a critical element to the program. This comes on the heels of what Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk announced back in February at the LSIC’s kickoff meeting. It was here that Jurczyk explained that the first mission (Artemis 1) would likely be delayed and would take place in “mid to late” 2021.

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https://www.universetoday.com/145428/the-lunar-gateway-is-no-longer-a-required-part-of-the-artemis-mission-to-return-to-the-moon-by-2024/