translated from Spanish: NASA selects Maxar as business partner for lunar program

Washington.-NASA Space agency announced today that it has chosen Maxar Technologies as business partner in the development and construction of the first energy and propulsion segment of Gateway, the base that will orbit around the moon when the astronauts go there in Five years. At a conference at the Florida Institute of Technology, the director of the agency, Jim Bridenstine, announced the decision that gives impetus to the Artemis program whereby the country will send astronauts to the South Pole of the moon in 2024. ” Gateway orbits the Moon for 15 years the official said. This time, when we go to the moon we will go on a permanent basis, a constant human presence for strategic reasons. The first to go will be a man and a woman. ”

The first human exploration program of the moon was called Apollo (Apollo in Spanish), and Bridenstine said today that the new program recalls that the god of Greek mythology had a sister, Artemis, and that is why his name was chosen for this stage.

Canada is the first international partner to join this commitment to a sustainable lunar architecture

“We will use the resources of the moon,” he added. “We have found that there are millions of tons of water ice, hundreds of millions of tons of hydrogen and oxygen that we have to take advantage of,” he said. Gateway will use electrical energy generated from solar radiation and give NASA access to more portions of the moon.

Maxar Technologies, headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, had already announced last week that NASA had selected its services “to study future systems that could revolutionize the agency’s space communications architecture.” Unlike the Apollo program, which between 1960 and 1972 sent 16 manned missions for short stays on the moon, with a global cost of 112 billion of current dollars, Artemis is designed as the first stage for the establishment of human on the satellite Of the Earth. The missions of the Apollo program brought astronauts to the equatorial region of the terrestrial satellite. Ten days ago, President Donald Trump announced that he had asked Congress for an additional allowance of 1.6 billion dollars, above the 21 billion dollars allocated for NASA in the budget, to drive the Artemis program.

This additional investment, said Bridenstine, “is a down payment on NASA’s efforts to place humans on the lunar surface at 2024”. In the coming years we will need additional funds, but this is a good amount that puts us on the starting line very strongly and prepares us for future successes, “he added. The ARTEMIS program aims at the lunar orbit of a station called the Gateway, which will serve as a port for manned and unmanned missions on the lunar surface.

Some of these missions will be in charge of ships built by the private company and numerous companies, including Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos, Amazon President and CEO, are developing capsules that could participate in NASA’s efforts.



Original source in Spanish