NASA to spend $20 billion on moon base, cancel orbiting lunar station

NASA is cancelling plans to deploy a space station in lunar orbit and will instead use its components to construct a $20 billion base on the moon's surface over the next seven years, its new chief Jared Isaacman said on Tuesday.

Isaacman, who was sworn in at the agency in December, made the announcement at the opening of a day-long event at NASA's Washington headquarters at which he outlined a raft of changes he is making to the agency's flagship moon program Artemis.

"It should not really surprise anyone that we are pausing Gateway in its current form and focusing on infrastructure that supports sustained operations on the lunar surface," Isaacman told delegates at the event.

The Lunar Gateway station, largely already built with contractors Northrop Grumman NOC.N and Vantor, formerly Maxar, was meant to be a space station parked in a lunar orbit. Repurposing the craft for a lunar surface base is not simple.

"Despite some of the very real hardware and schedule challenges, we can repurpose equipment and international partner commitments to support surface and other program objectives," Isaacman said.

Lunar Gateway was designed to serve as both a research platform and a transfer station that astronauts would use to board the moon landers before descending to the lunar surface.

The changes imposed by Isaacman on the flagship U.S. moon program in recent weeks are reshaping billions of dollars worth of contracts under the Artemis effort.

That is sending companies scrambling to accommodate the extra urgency as China makes progress toward its own 2030 moon landing.

-Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Jan Harvey/Reuters