Former NASA administrator says Lunar Gateway is “a stupid architecture”

Enlarge / Michael Griffin, under secretary of defense for research and engineering, testifies during a House Armed Services Committee in April. (credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
In recent weeks, NASA officials have been running a charm offensive on their proposed 'Gateway' in lunar space, which would serve as a space station in a distant orbit around the Moon. The agency has proposed this interim step in lieu of returning directly to the lunar surface with humans. The agency has even started talking about the Gateway as a 'spaceship,' presumably because this sounds more exciting than a 'station.'
Public criticism of the proposal has been limited to date, in part because so much of the aerospace community has the potential to earn contracts by either helping to build the lunar space station or supply it with consumables once it is up and running in the mid-2020s. (We spoke to a few of the public critics for a feature published in September.)

However, during a meeting of the National Space Council Users' Advisory Group on Thursday, some of the criticism we've heard privately spilled into public view. One of the committee's members, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, declared that, 'I'm quite opposed to the Gateway.'
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