HELP ME PLS!!! WILL MARK BRAINLIEST!!!

Read the excerpt from the passage Moon Mission.

NASA sees Gateway as a base for staging missions beyond the moon. What’s the next stop? Mars. The space agency plans to build a special craft for the trip. The Deep Space Transport will carry astronauts from Gateway to the Red Planet and back. This will reduce the enormous cost of shuttling supplies for a Mars mission all the way from Earth. The Mars transport could even expand its size by attaching one of Gateway’s habitat modules.

Which statement is a central idea supported by the details in the excerpt?

Gateway was designed to conduct an exploration of Mars.
The trip to Mars for exploration is extremely expensive.
Gateway is only the beginning of NASA’s space exploration plans.
Exploring Mars is more important than exploring the moon.

What we are asked to do here is an inverted process of analysis. Instead of giving us a central idea and then asking us to find evidence for it in a text, this question wants us to read the evidence first and then figure out what the main idea is.

According to the passage, the space station called Gateway has a very simple purpose: to stage "missions beyond the moon." This is the main piece of information we need to answer this question. Right after the moon, so to speak, there is Mars, so it is only logical for Mars to be targeted by space missions. However, the purpose of Gateway is not to stage "missions to Mars," but "missions beyond the moon." It was designed to help NASA expand its exploration plans in general, not only to Mars. With that in mind, we can choose letter C as the best option:

C. Gateway is only the beginning of NASA's exploration plans.