NASA officials promoted the Gateway as a "reusable command module" that could direct activities on the lunar surface. However, Gateway has received some negative reactions.
Former NASA-affiliated people Michael D. Griffin, a former NASA administrator, said that the Gateway could be useful only after there are facilities on the Moon producing propellant that could be transported to the Gateway. Griffin thinks that after that is achieved, the Gateway would then serve as a fuel depot. In a written testimony to Congress, Griffin stated that the current architecture requiring staging operations at a Gateway based in a lunar polar
near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) with a 6.5-day period was disadvantageous in that immediate return to the Gateway from the lunar surface is possible only on 6.5-day centers and that no early human lunar mission should knowingly accept the risk of stranding a crew, whether on the surface or in lunar orbit, for days at a time. Former NASA Associate Administrator
Doug Cooke wrote in an article on
The Hill stating, "NASA can significantly increase speed, simplicity, cost and probability of mission success by deferring Gateway, leveraging SLS, and reducing critical mission operations". He also wrote, "NASA should launch the lander elements (ascent and descent/transfer) on an SLS Block 1B. If an independent transfer element is required, it can be launched on a commercial launcher".
George Abbey, a former director of NASA's
Johnson Space Center, said, "The Gateway is, in essence, building a space station to orbit a natural space station, namely the Moon. [...] If we are going to return to the Moon, we should go directly there, not build a space station to orbit it". Former NASA astronaut
Terry W. Virts, who was a pilot of
STS-130 aboard and commander of the
ISS on
Expedition 43, wrote in an op-ed on
Ars Technica that the Gateway would "shackle human exploration, not enable it". He also said, "If we don't have the goal [of Gateway], we are putting the proverbial chicken before the egg by developing '
Gemini' before we know what '
Apollo' will look like. Regardless of a future destination, as someone who lived on the ISS for 200 days, I cannot envision a new technology that would be developed or validated by building another modular space station. Without a specific goal, we're unlikely to ever identify one". Virts further criticized NASA for abandoning its planned goal of separating crew from cargo, which was put in place following the
Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.
Apollo 11 astronaut
Buzz Aldrin stated that he is "quite opposed to the Gateway" and that "using the Gateway as a staging area for robotic or human missions to the lunar surface is absurd". Aldrin also questioned the benefit of the idea of sending "a crew to an intermediate point in space, pick up a lander there and go down". Conversely, Aldrin expressed support for
Robert Zubrin's Moon Direct concept which involves lunar landers traveling from Earth orbit to the lunar surface and back. Tom Young, a former director of NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center, stated at a hearing at the House Science committee that NASA's portfolio of human spaceflight programs may now be overloaded. "The plate is really full today... I personally think that the leadership is going to have to, number one, prioritize, but number two is probably to eliminate some of the things that are currently being done that will interrupt having any opportunity of 2024, or I would say even 2028". He said Artemis could be useful in preparations for later missions to Mars but he did not really see a required role for the Gateway in the lunar program.
Other people Clive Neal, a
University of Notre Dame geologist and advocate for the lunar exploration program, called the Gateway "a waste of money" and stated that NASA is "not fulfilling space policy by building an orbital space station around the Moon".
Mars Society founder
Robert Zubrin called the Gateway "NASA's worst plan yet" in an article in the
National Review. He said, "We do not need a lunar-orbiting station to go to the
Moon. We do not need such a station to go to
Mars. We do not need it to go to
near-Earth asteroids. We do not need it to go anywhere. Nor can we accomplish anything in such a station that we cannot do in the Earth-orbiting
International Space Station, except to expose human subjects to irradiation – a form of medical research for which a number of
Nazi doctors were hanged". Zubrin also stated, "If the goal is to build a Moon base, it should be built on the surface of the Moon. That is where the science is, that is where the shielding material is, and that is where the resources to make propellant and other useful things are to be found". Retired aerospace engineer Gerald Black wrote in an article on
The Space Review stating that the Gateway is "useless for supporting human return to the lunar surface and a lunar base". He added that it was not planned to be used as a rocket fuel depot and that stopping at the Gateway on the way to or from the Moon would serve no useful purpose and cost propellant. Astrophysicist
Ethan Siegel wrote an article in
Forbes titled "NASA's Idea For A Space Station In Lunar Orbit Takes Humanity Nowhere". Siegel stated that "Orbiting the Moon represents barely incremental progress; the only scientific 'advantages' to being in lunar orbit as opposed to
low Earth orbit are twofold: 1. You're outside of the
Van Allen belts. 2. You're closer to the lunar surface", reducing the time delay. His final opinion was that the Gateway is "a great way to spend a great deal of money, advancing science and humanity in no appreciable way".
Eric Berger, senior space editor at
Ars Technica, stated in an article that the "Gateway introduces costs and complexity into the Artemis Program at a time when NASA is already contending with a superfluity of both" and that "NASA would gain several benefits from canceling Gateway" including a reduction in energy, or delta-v, needed to carry out lunar missions and a simplified lunar landing. Berger also stated that requiring both Orion and Starship to dock with and undock from the Gateway is needlessly complex. In addition, Berger also called for cancelling the
Exploration Upper Stage and replacing it with United Launch Alliance's Centaur V upper stage to further simplify the Artemis Program. Mark Whittington, a contributor to
The Hill newspaper and an author of several space exploration studies, stated in an article that the "lunar orbit project doesn't help us get back to the Moon". Whittington also pointed out that a lunar orbiting space station was not used during the Apollo program and that a "reusable lunar lander could be refueled from a depot on the lunar surface and left in a parking orbit between missions without the need for a big, complex space station".
Response from NASA On 10 December 2018, NASA Administrator
Jim Bridenstine said at a presentation "There are people who say we need to get there, and we need to get there tomorrow", speaking of a crewed mission to the Moon, countering with "What we're doing here at NASA is following Space Policy Directive 1", speaking of the Gateway and following up with "I would argue that we got there in 1969. That race is over, and we won. The time now is to build a sustainable, reusable architecture. [...] The next time we go to the Moon, we're going to have American boots on the Moon with the American flag on their shoulders, and they're going to be standing side-by-side with our international partners who have never been to the Moon before". Dan Hartman, the program manager for Gateway, on 30 March 2020, told
Ars Technica that the benefits of using Gateway are extending the mission duration, buying down risk, providing research capability and the capability to re-use ascent modules.
GAO 2024 Report On 31 July 2024, the
United States Government Accountability Office found that the Gateway ran into numerous technical problems which have yet to be addressed by NASA. One problem was related to the PPE's ability to keep the Gateway integrated stack in the right orbit and pointing in the right direction when large, heavier vehicles are docked with the Gateway. The report found that although the Gateway was meeting the performance requirements for stack controllability that NASA set for it, those requirements do not account for the mass of some visiting vehicles that plan to dock with the Gateway. The mass of the lunar lander Starship is approximately 18 times greater than the value NASA used to develop the PPE's controllability parameters. Another major problem was that the co-manifested vehicle mass or CMV of the PPE and HALO are both exceeding their mass allocations. The report stated that if NASA cannot reduce the mass, it could affect the Gateway's ability to reach the correct lunar orbit. The report also stated that late design changes to reduce their mass could result in cost growth or schedule delay. Another risk was found related to several defects on a network chip—which affects multiple Gateway components, including the HALO's flight computer and power distribution system, which could have led Gateway's flight computers to unexpectedly restart, resulting in losing control of Gateway. The proposed 15-year lifespan was also considered to be too short to properly support a crewed mission to Mars. == See also ==