Tokyo believes that contributing to the multinational mission and sharing Japanese technology in water and air purification and to protecting astronauts from radiation will land it a spot at the station, from where it could eventually put an astronaut on the moon and boost Japan’s status as a space power.
If the leading space agencies of Europe, Canada, Russia and Japan, now working together at the International Space Station, join the Deep Space Gateway program in exchange for contributing their space modules and transport ships, they could be able to send their astronauts to the future station in the moon’s orbit.
NASA, for its part, is offerings to make the outpost available for training future expeditions to the moon’s surface.
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Space agencies are also mulling the idea of building a landing module to shuttle between the station and the moon.
