http://www.space.com/36270-nasa-deep-space-gateway-moon-orbit.html
It looks like NASA's stepping-stone to Mars will be a miniature space station in lunar orbit rather than a chunk of captured asteroid.
The agency plans to build an astronaut-tended "deep space gateway" in orbit around the moon during the first few missions of the Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and Orion crew capsule, which are scheduled to fly together for the first time in late 2018, NASA officials said.
"I envision different partners, both international and commercial, contributing to the gateway and using it in a variety of ways with a system that can move to different orbits to enable a variety of missions," William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C, said in a statement. [Red Planet or Bust: 5 Crewed Mars Mission Ideas]
"The gateway could move to support robotic or partner missions to the surface of the moon, or to a high lunar orbit to support missions departing from the gateway to other destinations in the solar system," Gerstenmaier added.
One of those "other destinations" is Mars. NASA is working to get astronauts to the vicinity of the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s, as directed by former President Barack Obama in 2010. For the last few years, the agency's envisioned "Journey to Mars" campaign has included the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), an effort to pluck a boulder from a near-Earth asteroid and drag the rock to lunar orbit, where it could be visited by astronauts aboard Orion.
But ARM's future looks bleak; President Donald Trump provided no money for the mission in his proposed 2018 federal budget, which the White House released earlier this month.
Also see:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/deep-space-gateway-to-open-opportunities-for-distant-destinations
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a25872/nasa-cis-lunar-orbit/
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/tdm/sep/index.html
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @12:28AM
They've already picked what they want to do, and they sure aren't letting go of it. They're very determined to use the SLS program to funnel federal money to the same Congressional districts that have been receiving it. What people do with the rockets after that point hardly matters.