General Motors announced Wednesday it is partnering with aerospace and defense company Lockheed Martin to develop the next generation of electric lunar roving vehicles that will travel greater distances than those did in the past.

The vehicles will be used for NASA’s Artemis program. On its website, NASA describes Artemis as “an ongoing space mission ... with the goal of landing the first female astronaut and next male astronaut on the moon’s South Pole by 2024.”

That landing will be the U.S. space agency’s first crewed moon mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. The mission to send humans, including a person of color, back to the moon is so that they can explore and conduct scientific experiments.

The rover vehicles are key to the next manned-moon mission because they will allow scientists to study such things as the ice on the moon, which will, in turn, help them understand the creation of Earth, said Kirk Shireman, vice president of lunar exploration campaigns at Lockheed Martin.

The rovers will be unpressurized and made of lightweight, strong, long-lasting and “resilient materials … exactly what those are, is in formulation,” Shireman said. He said initially, the rovers will carry two astronauts with the idea of expanding their size to hold more people in the future.