Lunar Gateway

Is the moon about to become a dumping ground? After that, big space news, really big.

NASA invited India's ISRO to join the Lunar Gateway, the moon-based program.

India and the US are deepening their space relationship in a way that could reshape the future of human exploration, and we will be breaking it all down.

And then something a little closer to home, of course, literally.

I think there's a few things that will be really, really key to the program working.

we kind of shifted Lunar Gateway, which is an orbiting station around the moon that we had planned for a while.

And we shifted the focus from that onto a sustained presence on the lunar surface, the moon base.

NASA then put forth a bunch of money after their Ignite event or ignition event, sorry, in March towards these lunar landing missions.

And the only important thing that I would point out here is unfortunately the US's policy on what we're doing in space likes to swing back and forth every four years.

You don't say it's just the way that it works.

And so when you get these hard pushes and you take something like Lunar Gateway, which we've been working on for a very long time and pivot to the moon base as someone that's really, really caring about the core underlying technology, you want to make sure this is not a one off.

And in two years later, it doesn't pivot back the other way.

It's also a great place to test new rovers.

We're even going to build something like the International Space Station in the Moon's orbit, the Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway.

It'll be a convenient platform for exploring our satellite and launching spacecraft into distant space.

If you start from here, the spacecraft won't need to spend almost all its fuel to overcome the force of Earth's gravity.

I think this is a great signal Of the commercial industry taking seriously NASA's intention to build out nuclear capability, particularly for the moon.

We saw it earlier in the year when NASA Ignition made the announcement that they are shifting away from the traditional lunar gateway that they had been developing for years towards a more nuclear, uh, centered design.

And since then, we've seen nuclear being taken way more seriously.

There's been an executive order that speeds up the licensing for nuclear flight, the flight of nuclear materials to space, and so far, City Labs has been one of the fastest to leverage that expedited licensing, uh, pathway.

Um, the fact that Firefly has already gotten blues, uh, the Blue Ghost lander out to the moon successfully, you, you hammered home the, the verb land, I think, with, with good cause.

Um, though I think, uh, uh, managing to get one lander to tip over multiple times is also impressive at a different rate.

Um, but the, the fact that we're seeing this effort in, in large part that coincides with NASA's stated shift to go from the Artemis to Lunar Gateway program that you and I both worked on into the moon base initiatives, um, is, is one that I think indicates the commercial segment is giving more credence to NASA's priority than maybe they would have previously.

A lot of the times, NASA's priorities change every, every f- uh, uh, four to, four to six years.

Astronaut Jeremy Hansen opened the Canadian National Exhibition and spoke about Canada's contributions to space exploration.

He emphasized ongoing work on the Lunar Gateway and future Artemis missions.

The appearance drew attention to Canada's robotics and astronaut programs.

Hansen's remarks connected current national efforts to the broader Artemis architecture.