One of the most expensive and discussed pillars in the new lunar race has officially gone down in history. NASA has put an end to the future of the Gateway orbital complex by issuing an official order to the main contractor Northrop Grumman to completely stop work on the vital HALO habitable module. The radical turn has forced the aerospace giant to urgently start redirecting hundreds of engineers and narrow specialists to completely different programs. The bitter assessment for the American taxpayer is harsh – Northrop Grumman has already spent over $1 billion on this alone, which, along with the contracts of dozens of subcontractors along the chain, will now have to be irretrievably written off as "sunk losses."
The major software and strategic change had been brewing since the agency's spring briefing, when the new administration decided to completely rewrite the architecture of the flagship Artemis program. Instead of building a complex and expensive intermediate "stop" in lunar orbit to serve as a transit shelter for astronauts, the priority was shifted directly to building a permanent base on the lunar surface itself. This decision automatically turned the HALO flying space studio into a completely unnecessary burden.
And while the station's power and propulsion module still found a lifeline – it will be rebuilt and integrated into a future nuclear-powered spacecraft for the Mars mission in 2028 - the fate of the living compartment remains tragic. Until recently, Northrop Grumman had been engaged in exhausting negotiations with the White House and the Space Agency in an attempt to save the project, proposing that HALO be modified for the needs of terrestrial lunar infrastructure. However, this engineering rescue proved absolutely impossible. On the one hand, the module's 9-ton body is too massive for current landers, and on the other - shocking details emerged that the precious aluminum body, manufactured in Italy by Thales Alenia Space, had already begun to show serious signs of corrosion and surface rust during its storage in the United States.
The request to freeze the project drove the final nail into the Gateway coffin, dragging other key players with it. Official shutdown orders have also been sent to Paragon Space Development, the company responsible for the module's complex life support systems. HALO's metal structure, which arrived ceremoniously in the States in the spring of 2025 to be fully assembled, is now becoming the most expensive monument to lost space ambitions. Because its interior and architecture were strictly profiled for a specific orbital configuration, NASA's radical change in course has rendered it completely useless for the needs of humanity for the foreseeable future.