THE US space agency has announced a $104 billion programme, dubbed “Apollo on steroids”, to put humans back on the Moon by 2018.

Nasa said that it planned to develop a spacecraft that, like the Apollo rockets that carried the first men to the Moon in 1969, would put crew members in a capsule atop a rocket.

The launch system, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, will use beefed-up shuttle and Apollo parts to land astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972, as well as a separate cargo rocket.

The capsule’s base would be 18ft, while Apollo’s was less than 13ft. It would carry six people, instead of Apollo’s three, and be able to stay in lunar orbit for six months.

“It is very Apollo-like . . . but bigger,” the Nasa administrator Michael Griffin said.

The first human mission will probably carry four people for a stay on the Moon of four to seven days, in 2018, Nasa said.

The mission would get to the Moon in several stages. First, a cargo vehicle would be sent into Earth orbit, where it would dock with a later launch of the crew capsule. It would then be propelled to lunar orbit, with a landing craft, whose bottom half would stay on the Moon as a long-term base. The astronauts would return to the capsule in the top half of the lander and travel back to Earth, landing with the aid of parachutes and airbags at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Mr Griffith defended the cost of the programme at a time when the US budget is stretched by the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. “The space programme is a long-term investment. We must deal with our short-term problems while not sacrificing our long-term investments in our future. When we have a hurricane, we don’t cancel the Air Force. We don’t cancel the Navy. And we’re not going to cancel Nasa.”

The launch system is part of President Bush’s 2004 Vision for Space Exploration, which called for a human mission to the Moon by 2020 and an eventual trip to Mars and other planets in our solar system.

The system will replace the ageing and now-grounded shuttle fleet, but would use shuttle components such as its solid rocket boosters, main engine and massive external tank.

Nasa remains committed, in the meantime, to completing the International Space Station with the existing shuttle fleet.The shuttles are scheduled to retire in 2010, but the Crew Exploration Vehicle will not be ready until 2012, leaving America with a two-year gap in which it has no way to send people into space on its own.

The three shuttles are currently grounded while experts try to solve problems with falling debris that doomed the shuttle Columbia in 2003. Russian vehicles now ferry people and cargo to the orbiting International Space Station.

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