From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.

On episode 344, a NASA astronaut and a Gateway manager discuss how the future lunar space station will be used for science, deep space exploration, and more. This episode was recorded on June 13 and 14, 2024.

Transcript

Host (Leah Cheshier): Houston, we have a podcast! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 344 “Gateway: The Lunar Space Station.” I’m Leah Cheshier, and I’m your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight and more. You may know Johnson Space Center as the home of the International Space Station Mission Control, but did you know, we’re planning for another space station? This time, one that will orbit the Moon. As part of the Artemis Program, Gateway will be humanity’s first space station beyond low Earth orbit, with the first elements scheduled to launch ahead of the Artemis IV mission on track for 2028. This will be a place where astronauts can live and work for up to 90 days, preparing for lunar surface missions or contributing to scientific research that cannot be done in low Earth orbit.

Later in the episode, you’ll hear from my co-host, Kenna Pell, who spoke with Stephanie Dudley, Gateway’s integration and Utilization Manager about how the lunar space station will be used for science. But first up, joining me to talk about Gateway is NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik. Prior to his selection as an astronaut in 2004, Bresnik was an F/A-18 fighter pilot and test pilot, and was eventually deployed to Kuwait to fly combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. A veteran of STS-129, he has also trained as a cavenaut with the European Space Agency, as well as an aquanaut for NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operation, or NEEMO 19. Bresnik served as the Commander of the International Space Station for Expedition 53 and Flight Engineer for Expedition 52 and has performed five spacewalks. Currently, he’s assistant to the Chief of the Astronaut Office for exploration, managing the development and testing of everything that will operate beyond low Earth orbit on Artemis missions. Let’s go!

[Music]

Host: Alright. Hi Randy. Thanks for joining us today.

Randy Bresnik: Very happy to be here.

Host: Let’s talk about Gateway. Why do we need a space station around the Moon?

Randy Bresnik: Well, because our space station around Earth, it’s been here for over two decades with humans continuously living in space, it’s only about 250 miles away from Earth. Well, if we’re going to explore our solar system, we need to reach out farther. Our nearest, closest neighbors is the Moon at 250,000 miles away. And so to be able to go and do lunar surface exploration missions and do sustainable missions, be able to do long duration missions, go to the Moon to stay, rather than just to visit like we did during Apollo, we need a space station and Gateway’s that station.

Host: I’m glad you talked about our space station here in low Earth orbit. The International Space Station Gateway itself is also an international effort. We have the European Space Agency, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, the Canadian Space Agency, and the Muhammad Bin Rashid Space Center. This is similar to the International Space Station. You know, we really all go. Why is it important for us to go together?

Randy Bresnik: Well, there’s the old saying that if you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go for a long time, you go together. And so it’s going to take a humankind effort to go to the Moon and then use that as a stepping stone to go to Mars. So it makes sense to take the international partnership basis that we’ve used for the last 20 years and move that, now out of low Earth orbit, and move that into lunar orbit and then eventually over to Mars.

Host: Yeah, I think that’s one of the big lessons learned from the International Space Station is the importance of that international cooperation that every country or every agency is able to contribute something different that is their specialty. So how have those past 25 years of space station operations, not just with our international partners, but just as a whole, how has that prepared us for Gateway?

Randy Bresnik: Well, imagine if you’re going to build a space station for the first time as far away as Gateway’s going to be, you know, we have learned so much with the operations, with the countermeasures, with communications, with logistical supply, you know, and basically humans being out there, you know, continuously, you know, six-month increments. Some people now, you know, Frank Rubio just got back for over a year. And so we’ve learned how to make the hardware piece and the dangerous environment of space work with the people piece that we have to go up there and rotate and take care of them and ensure that they’re safe and healthy to be able to execute their mission. And so that is, you know, it wouldn’t be possible to do Gateway right now if we had not had our experience with ISS and proven out that capability of humans to continuously operate in space these past 20 years.

Host: So let’s bring it back down and start painting a picture of Gateway for people. We have said the International Space Station in low Earth orbit is about the size of a six bedroom house. What is that equivalent for Gateway?

Randy Bresnik: It’s not quite a studio, but it’s more like a one bedroom apartment. We’ve got, you know, just the HALO, Habitation and Logistics Outpost, which is the first pressurized, you know, habitable module that’ll be up there. And then we will have the I-HAB, or the International Habitation that we’ll dock to it, but they’re not as large as the International Space Station modules, not on the outer diameter or the inside space. And then we add the other two modules, the ERM, the ESPRIT, refueling module, and the airlock. Those will add additional space. But it’s still going to be, you know, apartment size versus house size. And part of that is the fact that it takes a lot more effort to get those modules there and that we’re not going to be continuously living on it. You know, the plan is to send humans up on Artemis missions, but there will be portions of the year where humans will, you know, not be there at least during the initial build of Gateway.

Host: Okay. So it is smaller, but what are some of the challenges with its size? I mean, I know we have quite an ample amount of space on the International Space Station. When you look at Gateway, you know, do you have to consider your workout equipment and your living space, any crew quarter space? What are some challenges with that?

Randy Bresnik: Yeah, you’re not able to segment as much. So for example, within HALO, we have the area where you get an exercise, well, that area you get an exercise is also where you’re going to do your hygiene. It’s also the area where you have storage on all the walls where you’ve got to be able to get into stuff to be able to grab your science or your meals or things like that. And so it’s multi-purposing spaces. Take space station, for example, where we have logistics modules come up. Well, we have the ability and enough space to be able to pull everything out of those logistics modules and temp, we say temporary stow it, kind of put it out in the middle of the passageway and wait till we can, you know, do the game of Jenga with all logistics and stow it. And then we take the trash and the things that we are going to trash for a Cygnus module. Or if the things are returning to Earth on a Dragon cargo module, and then we stow them in. Well, on Gateway, it’s going to be a little different. There isn’t room to pull stuff out of logistics module and temp store it. So it’s more going to be more like an attached pantry where you can pull stuff out and use it. But then you got to, you know, take stuff from Gateway and put it back on logistics module to make space for the new stuff that’s coming on board. So that’ll be a new paradigm for us on Gateway.

Host: Oh, that makes sense. And you were talking about how long astronauts will spend on Gateway, and this is not a year-round crewed module like we’ve had with the International Space Station for the past 22, 23 years now. So how many astronauts will live on Gateway at a time, and about how long is their mission going to be?

Randy Bresnik: We start off with our initial, you know, first Gateway mission where we have the crew can only get there via Orion right now. So that’s four crew members, max. And our plan is to have the crew take up the International Habitation attached to Orion and birth it to the HALO and the power propulsion element that’s waiting in lunar orbit. And so the crew of four will dock with that. And then right now, the plan is to have two of those crew members go down to the surface on one of our lunar landers. So that means two crew members will stay up there for the week, then the surface mission’s going on. They’ll be out there working and outfitting and building up Gateway. And then the two crew members from the surface will come back up, the crew of four get together back at Orion and head home. So that’s, you know, where the crew will have about, you know, nine to 10 days on Gateway.

Host: Wow. So that’s quite a difference from Apollo missions where you are really only on the surface for what, a couple of days.

Randy Bresnik: Couple of days, yeah.

Host: So this gives us a lot more opportunity for these surface operations to evaluate the actual lunar surface itself more, bring back more.

Randy Bresnik: And so, you know, initially one lunar orbit of Gateway is about a week. And so the lunar surface missions are about a week. And so subsequent Artemis missions, we can go and have two weeks on the surface, so we’d have more time on Gateway, and then eventually, we may have it where we are sending a lunar surface mission down for a week or two, but we end up spending more time on Gateway. Maybe it’s a month and maybe up to 90 days, you know, by the time we get to the point where we are building a Mars-class transfer vehicle to leave the Earth-Moon system and go to Mars, we could be possibly using Gateway as a staging platform to build and assemble that vehicle and launch it from there. So we have more modules and more space and that type of stuff later on in Gateway. Possibly.

Host: I didn’t realize that one orbit of Gateway is a week. So this is a near-rectilinear—

Randy Bresnik: NRHO.

Host: NRHO, this is a near-rectilinear halo orbit, also known as a polar orbit. What is that? Why did we choose that for Gateway?

Randy Bresnik: Alright, so imagine if you’re looking at me and looking at my head from where you’re at, imagine you are Earth, your head is Earth, and my head is the Moon. Well, we leave Earth, we fly to the Moon directly, so between our two heads. But when we get to the Moon, we do this insertion to this near-rectilinear halo orbit, say that three times fast. And we actually kind of take a 90 degree turn. And so the halo orbit actually goes from my head to my belly button. So it is 90 degrees off from you looking at my head. And so what that does is that puts us over the poles of the Moon, which is where we plan on landing on the lunar South Pole. But it also allows our communication systems and everything to basically be facing Earth all the time. So we don’t have points where we go behind the Moon and have a blackout. And so that’s part of the reason we have that orbit. And the other reason is that orbit takes very little energy to stay in it. The ISS at 250 miles above the Earth, we’re constantly having to reboost it, as you know, it’s heavy. We’re going fast enough to stay in orbit, but also, the orbit decays a little bit, so you have to boost it back up. In the halo orbit, it takes very, very little energy to maintain that stable orbit. And for Gateway’s lifetime, which, you know, right now we’re planning on 15 years at least, that prop is really expensive and hard to get to the Moon at 250,000 miles away. And so that’s why we wanted to pick an orbit that allowed us to be sustained orbit with very little energy to stay there.

Host: That’s what I was thinking is the less prop you have to send, the less propellant, that also frees up weight for more cargo to arrive. So how does resupply work?

Randy Bresnik: So right now, we have one supplier picked for the lunar orbit resupply, and that’s SpaceX. And they’re going have a module that flies out there and is packed full of, you know, all the stuff we need, whether that is some clothing or its parts to bill or outfit Gateway or repair Gateway. It could be, you know, scientific equipment, it could be food, you know, stuff that we don’t have to carry on Orion or the lunar lander. We want to be able to have there on the logistics module. And then also when you leave, because it’s so small, you don’t want to leave stuff that could mold, decay. You know, you don’t want to leave the trash, you know, smelling up the station while crew members are not there. So that’s why it’ll go to the logistics module and then it’ll dispose.

Host: Well, when we don’t have people on Gateway, what are we doing with it out there as our orbiting outpost?

Randy Bresnik: Well, it’ll still have its scientific equipment. It’ll still have its computers. It’ll still have all its sensors. And so we’ll have the ability to conduct science experiments remotely, you know, just like we do in other remote areas, you know, here on Earth. Or even some of the remote stuff that PI’s execute on board the International Space Station. And so, there’s all this time and it’s what’s neat about, it is in deep space. And so it’s going to have a very different thermal environments, radiation is the biggest thing we want to find out about because we’re under the protection of the valve and radiation belts here on Earth and space. International Space Station is well underneath that. So it does not see the deep space radiation. And so Gateway and its sensors and its capability to be remotely controlled. It’ll be able to send back data for what it’s like to live long term in deep space. Why do we need that? When we go to Mars, right now our current technology of chemical rockets, it’s going to be an eight-to-nine-month journey in zero gravity and deep space. Then you get to Mars, you do the surface mission, and then it’s another eight to nine months back to Earth. And so we need to be able to figure out a way to keep the human beings healthy and figure out how to protect them from that deep space radiation while they’re in that transit between Earth and Mars.

Host: This is such an important discussion on how the International Space Station prepares us for Gateway. Gateway prepares us for sending people to Mars. Basically, either it’s studying how the human body reacts to a microgravity environment for a long duration mission or like you mentioned to the higher radiation levels that may be existent when we’re outside of Earth’s atmosphere. What other things do you think that this will help us pave the way for when it comes to going further into the solar system?

Randy Bresnik: On the International Space Station, we are, you know, minutes and hours away from Earth. The Moon, we are days away from Earth. And even though the communication systems allowed us to talk without much delay, there’s a huge lag in the ability to send things to the Moon or return things from the Moon. And so Gateway is a great place to figure out the logistics and the repair capability and things like that. We’ll have to figure out with the people that are there in this location far away from Earth, they’ll have to figure out how to fix things without the luxury of just having Earth send up another vehicle or return to Earth if there’s a problem. Those are all huge things that we have to be able to be comfortable and confident in our ability to repair and fix things when we’re on our way to Mars. When you’ve got this nine-month journey and there’s no turning around, and then coupled with the fact that we are having to have a comm delay because we’re so far away from Earth, that sending the radio signal back takes, you know, tens of minutes, and then Mission Control has to decipher all that and then send back the response in tens of minutes. And so the human machine system, being able to operate autonomously from Earth and Mission Control, is a huge part of what Gateway operations will allow us to do, to lead us to Mars.

Host: That’s a good answer. So we’re ready to launch Gateway. How do we put it together? We had to have spacewalks to put together the International Space Station and we still do to maintain and repair it. What’s that look like for Gateway?

Randy Bresnik: Alright, the power propulsion element, the most powerful solar electric vehicle, spacecraft, ever flown is going to be attached to the HALO, the Habitation and Logistics Outpost, and that’s going to launch on a Falcon Heavy as soon as we can, because it has a special propulsion system that uses very little power, but it’s going to take a long time to get there. So we’ll launch it on the Falcon Heavy, and then it’ll do a spiraling out away from Earth using Earth’s gravity to slingshot it eventually to the Moon, but all of that using very little power. And so we need to launch that and get that out there so it can be in place when we take the first habit module with the crew members on Artemis IV to the Gateway.

Host: Will we have to do spacewalks to maintain and improve it?

Randy Bresnik: So ideally, you know, Gateway is designed that we can actually berth the modules together and not have to do spacewalks to be able to make the station operational. But we are building in the capability to do so if we need to. Depending the mass constraints, there may be things that we have to, you know, take off to be able to get the mass down to be able to launch from Earth. And we’ll have an airlock, we’ll have spacesuits and crew members train, because we’ve been doing it for 20 plus years on ISS to go out to do that if it’s necessary. But ideally, we don’t.

Host Including yourself, Mr. Five Spacewalks.

Randy Bresnik: We’ve had the opportunity to do a few and every one of them was special. And, you know, crew members are getting ready to go out the door here. Just another 10 days for one on ISS.

Host: So once Gateway is operational, you said it’ll be in orbit for about 15 years.

Randy Bresnik: How cool is it to think that by that point we’re talking about possibility of using that as a place to build the Mars transfer vehicle? You know, I mean, that’s not that far away, you know, and to have Mars be that close and have us do all this work in low Earth orbit transitioning to lunar orbit, building blocks that prove the capability for us to be able to go to Mars, that’s pretty exciting. I mean, you think about the ice that’s been found on the Moon, well, that in-situ as we say, resource utilization, which is taking the ice and having something that can turn that ice into water and then into its two components. H2O, H is rocket fuel, and O is what we need to breathe. And if we can figure out how to do that on the Moon, well, we already know where there’s ice on Mars. And so then if we can then send, you know, uncrewed missions and robotic missions to the Mars to go to that ice, take that ice, turn it into rocket fuel and oxygen, and have tanks of this stuff, you know, fuel and oxygen sitting on the lunar surface, that allows us to build a much more efficient vehicle, cause we don’t have to take everything with us. We’ve got a bunch of it waiting there for us. And so that’s a technology the Moon proves out that if we can get going on Mars early enough, that will really shrink the time that it takes for humans to get to Mars.

Host: What are you most excited about when it comes to Gateway? Whether it’s initial launch, first crew to visit, you know, what we might find through lunar surface operations?

Randy Bresnik: I think big picture, the fact that it allowed us the staining missions on the lunar surface and longer duration missions on the lunar surface, and a place close to home from the lunar surface, you know, for crew members to be rather than lunar surface, the closest humans. And, you know, safety is five days away, hey, it’s a short, you know, 24 hours to get from the surface to Gateway. So that part is certainly exciting because it enables the larger architecture and larger surface exploration. . It’s wonderful to be able to see the international partnership that started here on Earth transition to lunar orbit and take that partnership from 250 miles away from Earth to 250,000 miles away from Earth. And the international crews and the international astronauts that’ll perform these missions will be the first humans that are making their home in deep space. We’ve never done that before and that’s an amazing aspect of Gateway.

I think as an individual, I mean, imagine being in the ESPRIT module with its windows around it and coming through the part of the NRHO orbit where you’re closest to the Moon and you’re looking out those windows and you’re seeing the Moon go by. And then as you’re in that orbit, you can look out the other windows and see the tiny Earth that can be covered by your thumb. I think that’s going to be a pretty neat place to be, you know, as human beings onboard Gateway.

Host: That’s incredible. I’m so excited for this already. So where can people go to learn more about Gateway?

Randy Bresnik: nasa.gov. You can learn about Gateway and everything else that NASA’s doing, whether it is what astronauts are doing, what’s going on in Mission Control, what’s going on with our Science Mission Directorate, what’s going on with our aviation, everything is there and it is amazing all the different things that NASA continues to do for the American people on, you know, a tiny percentage of the overall national budget. I mean, we are one of the few places in America that is doing stuff that is 10, 20, 30 years down the road and it’s the future. And so that’s why it’s so important for NASA to keep, you know, stretching out and taking the next giant leap so that there’s a future to go to and a future for our young people to aspire to. Because those of us that are here working at NASA now are not going to be the ones that are going to be going to Mars. It’s going to be young people out there that are in school that are becoming the engineers or the scientists or the rocket scientists or the pilots you know of tomorrow. Those are the ones that are going to be doing those missions and we are enabling that today.

Host: Thank you so much for joining us, Randy. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. I’m excited for us to dive in even more to Gateway.

Randy Bresnik: Excellent. Thanks for having me and looking forward to seeing everybody in the stars.

Host (Kenna Pell): That was the perfect Gateway 101. And now since you’re acquainted with humanity’s first orbiting laboratory around the Moon, let’s take a deeper dive into the lunar space station as none other than a deep space science destination. We have Stephanie Dudley joining us now. She’s the Gateway Program’s Integration and Utilization Manager here to talk all things Gateway science. Stephanie’s storied career spans multiple NASA human spaceflight programs. And a great tie in to our astronaut guests in this episode, she even served as the lead payload operations director responsible for International Space Station science during Randy’s most recent mission to station.

Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us today. And while this is Houston We Have a Podcast, I think we have something in common that doesn’t have to do with Houston. Are you from Florida Space Coast?

Stephanie Dudley: I am, yes.

Host: I am too. Where are you from?

Stephanie Dudley: I grew up in Melbourne, Florida.

Host: Okay. I’m from Merritt Island. I actually grew up in Patrick, and then we do have something in common as far as coming over to JSC and I think you were at Marshall before too, is that right? I was definitely snooping on your bios before this. So I saw the University of Florida and then looked deeper and I thought it was cool where while you grew up on the Space Coast, you never thought you’d work at NASA.

Stephanie Dudley: Never. They were superheroes. They weren’t real people.

Host: Well, we’re in Houston now and this is Houston We Have a Podcast and we’re here to talk Gateway. This is the first part in a series kicking off all things Gateway. And I think to start off, so your official NASA title is Mission Integration and Utilization Manager. What does that mean?

Stephanie Dudley: Yeah, so let’s start with utilization. So utilization is the inclusive term for all of the science, the research, the technology, the outreach, the education, all of those kind of activities that we would like to do in space. So mission integration and utilization is making sure that, you know, we have all of the activities and requirements and the things that we need to do in the mission tracked and achievable. And that includes the utilization or the science that we want to perform in the mission. So that’s everything from the power or the network assets or the cargo to make sure that we have to be able to do the activities.

Host: I did not realize that utilization was inclusive of all those things. Okay. And so how did you come to Gateway and how does your work fit into Artemis?

Stephanie Dudley: Okay. So, I am an engineer, but I have always had a love of sciences. So I’ve worked at KSC doing shuttle stress analysis, fracture mechanics, for this the solid rocket booster. That’s where I started my career. Worked on Constellation Program at Marshall Space Flight Center. I also did some payload operations for the International Space Station while I was at Marshall. And then moved to JSC and worked in the ISS Vehicle Engineering Office. So I actually was responsible for leaving the team of engineers responding to real-time anomalies on the space station. So I have a lot of history in a lot of different spaceflight programs and utilization and science ops in particular before I came to Gateway. So I was actually the lead payload operations director. So that’s the person that’s responsible for all of the science operations on the space station, during Randy’s Expedition 53. So, when I came to Gateway doing utilization and mission integration, there is a synergy with the research that we’re doing in other parts of the Moon to Mars or Artemis missions. So, the users, the science that we want to perform, the international partners, the people who are operating the science experiments, all of those people are the same and they don’t care whether their experiment necessarily is operated on the LTV or on a pressurized rover or in HLS, they just want it to work. So it makes a lot of sense while we’re standing up these programs to have people that are doing the same thing in the same places, having the same processes. And so my work as the Moon to Mars Program Exploration Operations Deputy Director is helping to make sure that across all of the six programs, including Gateway, we’re all focusing on utilization in the same way.

Host: Oh, wow. Okay. I did not realize it was among all those different programs are parts of it. And so you mentioned something about international partners, and I love that this episode today we’re just kind of talking the foundations, right, of Gateway and the number one thing is being science. And so we’ll get to international partners in a later episode about Gateway. But just like ISS, it’s all about science. And when you first think of Gateway, it is humanity’s first orbiting laboratory around the Moon. So maybe people don’t think of science right away. So the big part of the story here is, let’s get into it. How will Gateway support scientific investigations?

Stephanie Dudley: So I don’t want to miss the fact that Gateway is in of itself a humongous technological marvel. It is going to be an incredible feat of engineering. It is the first space station around the Moon. It is amazing. We have built on everything that NASA has done in human spaceflight. So going back through all those programs that I’ve participated in before, but even before that, Apollo, Skylab, ISS, right? All of those things are bringing us back to the Moon. And so going forward also, Gateway is our stepping-stone. It is our Gateway to Mars. So it is going to be a very important part of our future exploration missions.

So you asked about science. Gateway is going to be a very important part of that science portfolio. Artemis in particular is going to be doing lunar-related science. So we want to return samples from the Moon. We want to do technology demonstrations that enable our surface science and study the Moon from Gateway.

Host: And I love how you said that Gateway was the stepping-stone to Mars and what other is the stepping-stone to the Moon and to Mars is ISS. And you have great experience supporting a bunch of science there, especially the tie in with Randy, which is really cool. So can you remind our listeners why it’s so important to get back to the lunar surface when we’ve already been there?

Stephanie Dudley: Yeah. So Artemis is going to take us to parts of the Moon that we haven’t been to before. So specifically, we’re going to go to the lunar South Pole. There are water ice and other chemicals in the South Pole of the Moon that will literally tell us about our planetary history. They are going to unlock the secrets of our solar system. This is not something that we can do by any other means, but going.

Host: I love that. We can’t do this any other way but going. But that’s a great reminder that it’s all about science. Artemis is all about science. And so I know that science doesn’t start or end with the lunar South Pole. What other science will Gateway be part of?

Stephanie Dudley: So I said earlier that Gateway is our stepping-stone to Mars. So we are going to be learning about deep space exploration, right? We know how to live and work in low Earth orbit through ISS, but now it’s time to go further. When we’re in low Earth orbit, we’re protected by the Earth’s atmosphere. When we are around the Moon, we don’t have that protection. So it is going to affect everything. It will affect the humans, it will affect our spacecraft, it will affect our materials. We have the very unique ability at Gateway to study that radiation. But there are other things we can study at Gateway too. So Heliophysics, like the study of the Sun, we can’t do that from the Earth because we’re too close, right, to the Earth. We can’t do it in low Earth orbit because we’re too close to the Earth. We have that protection from the Earth’s magnetic field. So astrophysics, fundamental physics, space biology, life sciences, like we don’t know how radiation affects plants. We don’t know how it affects pharmaceuticals. All of these things we are going to need to know before we go to Mars. There is a flammability peak that scientists have discovered at one sixth G. Obviously Mars has a different gravity than the Moon. But we need to study that and see where the crossover points are in flammability so that we can protect our astronauts when we go to Mars. And then also as I mentioned, the health science, like the things that we will do on Gateway, will be buying down our human risk of going to Mars and lunar orbit is the perfect place to test our autonomous medical capabilities that are needed for those missions to Mars.

Host: So it’s great to see so many areas of scientific studies, so many different areas and a lot of it kind of comes down to location. So you’ve got radiation, location such as natural environment, induced environment, Helio, astrophysics, space biology, health. Is this all happening right now or where does all this stand?

Stephanie Dudley:  Yeah, so our first three payloads will study, our first science experiments will study radiation. So we have the HERMES experiment that is built by Goddard Space Flight Center. That will be an external instrument on the HALO module. We have the ERSA experiment. So that’s a European Space radiation experiment built by ESA that has sensors included in it from JAXA. That one will be external to the PPE, Power and Propulsion Element on Gateway. And then an internal experiment, IDA, International Dosimeter Array, that’s also built by ESA with sensors from JAXA. And, like I said, that one is internal to the HALO module. All three of these payloads, science experiments, will launch with the first mission to of Gateway and will start to collect data as soon as the vehicle is power positive and we’re on our way to the Moon. So we don’t even have to wait until we get there to start collecting science. And the really beautiful thing about these experiments is that the three scientific teams have joined forces and are all sharing data amongst themselves. So Gateway is going to be the canary in the coal mine, so to speak to better understand the radiation environment.

Host: I love that part where you said you don’t even have to wait to get there until the science starts. That’s awesome. And so thinking about ISS and how it’s been flying for more than two-and-a-half decades, and you’ve got great experience with that. And all the science accomplishments that have come out of it, benefits for humanity. Do you see the same thing happening with Gateway?

Stephanie Dudley: Absolutely. You know, at the start of ISS, we didn’t know what we would accomplish on it. And I see the same thing for Gateway. We are building it for a 15-year lifespan, but definitely hope that we go longer than that. And so that many years of scientific study in a place where humans have never worked and lived long-term, Gateway is going to allow us to do that. So it’ll take like any scientific achievement, right? It takes years to get enough data to get through a peer review process before we actually see those results. But it’s going to be remarkable, and I can’t wait.

Host: Any parting thoughts about Gateway science?

Stephanie Dudley: Gateway sounds so science fiction, but it’s real. And we’re building it. And in a few years, it’s going be around the Moon and that’s when the real work, the fun work in my opinion, is going to begin and science will never be the same.

Host: Thank you, Stephanie. I’ve learned so much all about the science and we have so much more to come all about Gateway, but where can folks, our listeners, learn more about the orbiting lab around the Moon?

Stephanie Dudley: nasa.gov/gateway.

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Host: Thanks for sticking around. I hope you learned something new today. Like Stephanie said, check out nasa.gov/gateway for the latest on the lunar space station. Our full collection of episodes is on nasa.gov/podcasts. You can also find the many other wonderful podcasts we have across the agency there too. On social media, we’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, X, and Instagram. Use #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit your idea or ask a question, just make sure to mention it’s for Houston We Have a Podcast. The conversations with Stephanie and Randy were recorded on June 13 and 14, 2024 respectively. Thanks to Will Flato, Dane Turner, Abby Graf, Jaden Jennings, Leah Cheshier, Raegan Scharfetter, Dylan Connell, Courtney Beasley, and Gary Jordan. And of course, thanks again to Randy Bresnik and Stephanie Dudley for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on. And tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.

This is an Official NASA Podcast.