Following a big publicity push this week to cement NASA’s renewed determination to establish a permanent base on the moon – whether staffed by robots or humans – the organisation’s administrator Jim Bridenstine posed inside the Super Guppy aircraft at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
The Guppy is a huge plane, set to be used soon to ferry the crew module from an Orion spacecraft to a facility in Ohio for the next round of testing.
Orions will serve as exploration vehicles for a new round of space missions set to begin, after test flights, in the early 2020s.