Ledyard King

USATODAY

WASHINGTON – NASA hasn’t officially scrapped its mission to use an asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars but it’s taking steps to chart a new approach that instead would rely on a spaceport circling the moon.

Under a program dubbed Deep Space Gateway, agency officials Tuesday said they still plan to use the lunar orbit as a staging platform to build and test the infrastructure and the systems needed to send astronauts to Mars. But instead of breaking off a chunk of asteroid and dragging it to the moon, NASA's new plan calls for building an orbiting spaceport that could have even more uses.

The space port, a mini space station in essence, would serve as a gateway for missions both to deep space and the lunar surface. Though not designed for a permanent crew, the spaceport would be equipped with a small habitat for astronauts, docking capability, an airlock, and would be serviced by logistics modules to enable research, according to NASA.

The gateway would allow engineers to develop new skills and technologies that have evolved since the assembly of the International Space Station which orbits the Earth, NASA officials said. No immediate cost estimates were available but a variety of different governments and companies would be expected to build, maintain and use the facility.

“I envision different partners, both international and commercial, contributing to the gateway and using it in a variety of ways with a system that can move to different orbits to enable a variety of missions,” said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations said in a news release Tuesday.

He said the gateway could support robotic or partner missions to the surface of the moon, or to a high lunar orbit “to support missions departing from the gateway to other destinations in the solar system.”

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The first mission for the new program will take place using the Saturn V-class Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft being assembled for the ultimate goal of reaching Mars.

The first test flight of both components with no crew on board was scheduled to lift off in late 2018. But Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s acting administrator, told employees the agency is studying whether to add astronauts to that mission, which would probably result in a launch no earlier than 2019.

NASA’s announcement about Deep Space Gateway makes no mention of an asteroid mission, which the Obama administration had touted as a relatively inexpensive way of testing the SLS and Orion and conducting deep-space experiments valuable to a Mars mission.

Under that mission, a spacecraft would visit an asteroid, break off a piece and transport it to lunar orbit.

But a trip to an asteroid, widely panned by Republican leaders in Congress who prefer a return to the moon, essentially died when Donald Trump was elected president.

The 2018 budget outline the White House unveiled earlier this month canceled the Asteroid Redirect Mission.

“NASA will investigate approaches for reducing the costs of exploration missions to enable a more expansive exploration program,” according to the budget document.