Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Lunar Gateway was a planned space station designed to be assembled in orbit around the Moon as part of NASA's Artemis program. It was developed from 2017 until 2026, when NASA shifted its focus to building a lunar surface base instead.
NASA announced in March 2026 that it would pause the Lunar Gateway as designed and pursue a lunar surface base instead. That decision followed a fiscal year 2026 budget proposal from the second Trump administration on the 2nd of May 2025 that first called for cancelling the program.
The Lunar Gateway's partners included the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, and the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre of the United Arab Emirates. Russia's Roscosmos held early cooperation talks but declined to participate in January 2021.
NASA selected the near-rectilinear halo orbit because it reduced the propulsion needed for Orion's European Service Module, which could not independently depart from low lunar orbit. The orbit also minimized communications blackouts with Earth.
Critics of the Lunar Gateway included former NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin, former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin, and Ars Technica editor Eric Berger. Aldrin called using Gateway as a staging area for lunar missions absurd, while Zubrin called it NASA's worst plan yet.
NASA announced in March 2026 that the Power and Propulsion Element would be repurposed as part of Space Reactor-1 Freedom. That proposed spacecraft is meant to be the first nuclear fission-powered interplanetary mission and to demonstrate nuclear electric propulsion in deep space.