I hope the moon space station never gets built

Started by Legend, Jan 24, 2018, 02:39 AM

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Legend

The deep space gateway is a planned space station that will be in lunar orbit. As cool as this sounds, and it would be legit awesome, it'd stop NASA from advancing for ~20 years.

For starters, a lunar space station is just not that beneficial. It offers near zero benefits for moon science and probes can study deep space conditions better. A lunar station might have some use as a way station for traffic to the moon's surface but the Deep Space Gateway is not designed to support that. Instead it's supposed to be a way station to Mars which is arguably not needed. Getting from low Earth orbit to the DSG will take just as much fuel as getting from low Earth orbit to Mars.

NASA plans to use the Deep Space Gateway to simulate Mars missions. The station can only fit one crew at a time and would spend time without anyone onboard, so they can treat it as if the station was a Mars bound vessel. Send up a crew, leave them alone for a year with delayed communication, and then let them come back. It could be nice to test radiation shielding and the human effects of such a mission while having an abort option, but this is not a necessary step for going to Mars. Isolation tests commonly happen on Earth and radiation testing can happen with probes. Additionally if such a dry run is desired, a true Mars class vessel could achieve it just like how Apollo 10 did everything except physically landing on the moon.


So the Deep Space Gateway is not needed and has minimal benefits. It's not controversial to think that either.

The big problem however is that it'll be incredibly expensive and seems to only exist as a way to give SLS+Orion a purpose. Currently SLS only has one other use and that's launching the Europa clipper. The clipper isn't even confirmed for SLS and could launch on an Atlas V as a backup. Additionally since it's still half a decade from launching, it could launch on a myriad of other rockets such as Falcon Heavy, Vulcan, New Glenn, or even potentially BFR.

The DSG however can only be built by SLS. Other rockets could construct a lunar space station for significantly cheaper but the DSG is designed to need SLS and Orion for assembly. So once DSG is started, it'll either need to be abandoned (incredibly unlikely and imbaricing) or keep SLS alive till the 2030s.



Instead they could do pretty much anything else and it'd be better.  :P