Space Environments Applied to the Gateway Program

NASA’s Gateway is a crewed space station with a planned mission duration of 15 years in lunar orbit. It is an international collaboration, including partnerships with the European Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, and Japan Aerospace Explorations Agency. Additionally, the program relies on important partnerships with industry for designing and building hardware. This complex mission poses significant challenges related to space environments. Gateway’s hardware will be directly exposed to the extremes of space weather posing challenges to avionics and materials as well as operations planning. The space environments are defined in the “Design Specification for Natural Environments” and applied through program requirements to all design partners. This paper describes the space environments applicable to the Gateway program, the flow of the environments to system requirements, and the challenges that the program is currently facing with regard to the space environments.