by 
NASA/Alberto Bertolin
Relations between NASA and the state-owned Russian space company were pretty solid five years ago, when the two sides signed a joint statement discussing a partnership to develop a space station orbiting the moon, called the Lunar Gateway. At the time, Russia’s Roscosmos was expected to provide an airlock for the facility.
A lot has happened in the five years since then, of course. In 2020, as NASA began to formulate its plans for lunar exploration under the Artemis program more concretely, Russia began to pull back.
“In our opinion, the Lunar Gateway in its current form is too US-centric, so to speak,” said then Roscosmos director general Dmitry Rogozin. “Russia is likely to refrain from large-scale participation.” At the time, Rogozin also expressed disdain for the “Artemis Accords” created by NASA, which set out a set of principles to guide cooperation among nations participating in the agency’s 21st-century lunar exploration plans.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the country was already leaning towards collaborating with China on an “International Lunar Research Station”. This is a parallel effort to NASA’s Artemis program, which invites countries to join China and Russia in cooperating in the exploration of the Moon.
As Russia was walking away from NASA, nearly two dozen countries signed multilateral agreements to join NASA’s Artemis Accords. One of the founding member countries, the United Arab Emirates, is looking to continue its participation. On Tuesday, The National reported that the UAE is in discussions with NASA to provide an airlock for the Lunar Gateway. The small Middle Eastern nation has been working with Boeing on the projects.
Separately, a source confirmed to Ars that the UAE has been talking to NASA for about a year about providing an airlock for the Gateway. It is likely that the first elements of this small station, which will fly in a halo orbit around the Moon, will be launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket in late 2024 or 2025. Humans will not live on the Gateway continuously, as with the Station international space, but rather to inhabit it periodically. An airlock would facilitate spacewalks.
The Islamic nation, which is smaller in area than the US state of Maine, has a population of about 9 million people. However, he has expressed a huge interest in space exploration. In June 2020, through a partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, the UAE space program sent the ‘Hope’ probe to Mars to study the atmosphere of the red planet. UAE officials said the aim of this program was to inspire its younger generation to pursue science, technology, engineering and medicine. At the time, only Russia, the United States, the European Union and India had successfully put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars.
Last weekend, the UAE participated in its first lunar launch. His small lunar rover Rashid was a passenger aboard the Hakuto-R lander, commercially developed by the Japanese company ispace. That mission was successfully launched on a Falcon 9 rocket and is expected to land on the moon early next year.
The country also has a small astronaut corps. In 2019, Hazza Al Mansouri flew to the International Space Station on a Soyuz rocket for eight days as a visiting astronaut. Next February, Sultan Al Neyadi is expected to join the Crew-6 mission, where she will spend about six months aboard the space station. His place was brokered by Axiom Space. More UAE astronauts are training in Houston for future space missions.
Through its partnership in the Artemis Accords, the UAE is positioning itself to send an astronaut to the Lunar Gateway later this decade, and possibly to the surface of the Moon in the 2030s.
