The Moon will soon have its own airport, but instead of runways, there will be orbits, and instead of air traffic controllers, mathematical algorithms. NASA is preparing Gateway, the first spaceport in human history, which will serve as a waystation for astronauts, cargo ships, and lunar landers. Kursiv LifeStyle explains how it will work and why without it, future Moon missions could turn into a cosmic traffic jam, reports infohub.kz.
Gateway is planned for use in future lunar missions. The station will receive crewed Orion spacecraft, cargo vehicles, and landing modules. In the future, it may also serve missions bound for deeper space.
However, there won't be a traditional airport with terminals and runways on the Moon. Gateway will be placed in a special orbit called Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO). This orbit is highly elongated: the station will pass about 1,600 kilometers from the Moon's north pole and then recede to nearly 64,000 kilometers from the lunar surface.
This orbit allows for communication with Earth and requires relatively little fuel to maintain. But due to the gravitational pull of both Earth and the Moon, simply parking several spacecraft nearby won't be possible.
That's why engineers from Texas A&M University, NASA, and Purdue University have developed a traffic management system for future spacecraft. They ran thousands of computer simulations to test how vehicles can stay near Gateway without interfering with each other.
In this way, the station will resemble an airport. If a parking spot at Gateway is occupied, an arriving spacecraft cannot simply hover next to the station. It will have to remain at a calculated distance and wait for the right moment to dock or depart. Researchers call this loitering—essentially, cosmic parking.
Earlier, Kursiv LifeStyle reported that NASA is testing an unusual system that can convert astronaut waste into useful resources: water, fertilizer, and even materials for 3D printing. The technology is being developed for future missions to the Moon and Mars.