NASA Halts Northrop Grumman Work on Lunar HALO Module

Three months ago, NASA held a high-profile event at its Washington, D.C., headquarters to announce a major strategic shift: the agency would pivot from an orbital lunar space station to establishing a permanent Moon base on the surface. In that same announcement, officials confirmed that work on the Lunar Gateway,the planned outpost orbiting the Moon,would be paused.

At the time, NASA revealed that one of the two most advanced Gateway components, the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) , would be repurposed as the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space. But the agency remained vague about the fate of the other key piece: the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) .

This 6.1-meter-long pressurized module was designed to be the primary living and working space for astronauts visiting the Lunar Gateway. NASA has awarded Northrop Grumman contracts totaling $1.1 billion to design, build, and integrate HALO with the PPE. Following the March announcement, Northrop Grumman aggressively lobbied NASA and other stakeholders to incorporate the HALO module into the agency’s Moon Base plans. But according to sources familiar with the matter, those efforts have failed.

Ars has learned that last week, Paragon Space Development Corp. ,a key contractor for HALO’s life-support system,was instructed to halt all work on the space vehicle. Paragon had secured a contract worth more than $100 million in 2022 to develop the critical life-support hardware for the module. Two separate sources confirmed the stop-work order, signaling that HALO’s role in NASA’s lunar future is now effectively over.