NASA readies ambitious plans for trips to the moon and Mars.

Byline: Michael Cabbage

HOUSTON _ NASA's new road map for the human exploration of space would land four astronauts on the moon by 2018 as the first step toward an eventual six-person voyage to Mars.

Pioneers would build a lunar outpost, most likely at the south pole, with living quarters, power plants and communication systems. Expeditions would scavenge the desolate landscape for precious supplies such as fuel and water.

Astronauts would roam the surface in high-tech dune buggies to search for answers to scientific riddles that continue to baffle researchers. The crews would blast off aboard rockets derived from the space-shuttle fleet and parachute back to Earth in capsules similar to those used during the Apollo program.

The assault on the moon would be a precursor to 500-day expeditions on Mars, an alien world more than 35 million miles away that some scientists suspect could hold evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Those and other specifics of NASA's ambitious plans for a new era of human space travel are outlined in a set of internal briefing charts on the agency's recent Exploration Systems Architecture Study. A copy of those briefings, parts of which are scheduled to be made public this month, was obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

Some things are subject to change, and important decisions have yet to be made. But the study is the first detailed description of how NASA intends to accomplish the goals announced by President Bush in January 2004 of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 to prepare for later missions to Mars.