Europe will "negotiate" with NASA its participation in future lunar missions.

NASA announced a little over a week ago that it was suspending the project to build a space station around the Moon, named Gateway, to focus on building a base on the lunar surface.

For Europe's space program, this change of course raises the question of what will happen to its agreements with NASA under the Gateway project, which provided for sending three European astronauts on Artemis missions.

A German was to fly first. A Frenchman, who could be Thomas Pesquet, and an Italian were to follow.

"We had an agreement with NASA for three seats on the flights to the Gateway. The Gateway is suspended, so I'm going to have to sit down with the administrator, Jared Isaacman, and NASA, to negotiate how those seats that had been allocated for the Gateway can be used for the (lunar) surface," said Josef Aschbacher, who came to the Kennedy Space Center to attend the launch of the four American and Canadian astronauts of the Artemis 2 mission, who will orbit the Moon in the next nine days.

"How many seats on surface flights, under what conditions, what concessions must Europe make in these negotiations and discussions?" he listed. "This is a discussion that needs to take place now," he insisted. "We really need to delve into the details to resolve all of this."

"The goal is to have Europeans walking on the Moon," the Austrian official insisted.

"It is clear that at the beginning we need to work with the United States to make this possible. But of course, the dream, or the goal, is that in the long term Europe will develop its own technologies and skills to be more autonomous in manned spaceflight," he aspired.

Europe was to provide some of the Gateway elements, already built or under development - as was the Japanese space agency (JAXA), another NASA partner, with a Japanese astronaut scheduled to travel before the first European.