In an effort to help humanity extend survival out into the solar system, NASA scientists are currently planning the launch of two separate mission concepts to assess and mine ice water stored on the moon.

According to Space.com, the projects – labeled Lunar Flashlight and the Resource Prospector Mission – are tentatively expected to launch in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

“If you’re going to have humans on the moon and you need water for drinking, breathing, rocket fuel, anything you want, it’s much, much cheaper to live off the land than it is to bring everything with you,” said Barbara Cohen, principal investigator of Lunar Flashlight from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Tech Times reports that the Lunar Flashlight mission, which will be the first flight of NASA’s Space Launch System megarocket, will include sending a spacecraft the size of a cereal box into space. The spacecraft will expand to 860 square feet during its trip to the moon and is expected to mine and analyze ice water found near the lunar poles using solar power.

“We’re going to use it as a mirror,” said Cohen. “We’re going to take the sunlight, bounce it off the solar sail into the permanently shadowed regions, and we’re going to use a passive infrared spectrometer to collect the light from the permanently shadowed regions in wavelengths that are indicative of water frost.”

NASA’s Resource Prospector Mission (RPM) is expected to launch a rover on the moon’s surface to analyze moon ice, mapping the surfaces that contain concentrations of hydrogen. “We need to take the first steps in demonstrating off of this world utilization of material,” said Tony Colaprete, RPM project scientist. “There’s a lot of technology demonstration in here that’s not just applicable to the moon; it’s applicable to any mission, to any surface where you want to manipulate materials.”

NASA will not be the only organization focused on exploiting water on the moon, however, as Tech Times reports that private firms Moon Express and Shackleton Energy Co. also plan to mine moon water in the future.

“What we’re looking for is water right at the surface,” said Cohen. “Could humans or their vehicles go into a permanently shadowed region and just scoop up the regolith and use what’s at the surface to be able to extract water ice?”