NASA wants 4 astronauts on the Moon in 2018

NASA’s plan envisions being able to land four-person human crews anywhere on the Moon’s surface and to eventually use the system to transport crew members to and from a lunar outpost that it would consider building on the lunar south pole, according to the charts, because of the regions elevated quantities of hydrogen and possibly water ice.

One of NASA’s reasons for going back to the Moon is to demonstrate that astronauts can essentially “live off the land” by using lunar resources to produce potable water, fuel and other valuable commodities. Such capabilities are considered extremely important to human expeditions to Mars which, because of the distances involved, would be much longer missions entailing a minimum of 500 days spent on the planet’s surface.