Denver-based Lockheed Martin announced Wednesday the aerospace company will team up with General Motors to build the next-generation lunar vehicle.

Developing the vehicle is part of NASA’s Artemis program, which hopes to land female and people of color astronauts on the moon. The program challenged the aerospace industry to design a lunar terrain vehicle  to carry astronauts farther than the 4.7 miles previous rovers have traveled.

GM’s Alan Wexler, senior vice president of Innovation and Growth, said at a Wednesday video news conference to announce the partnership that the car company has a 50-plus year partnership history with NASA, dating to the Apollo 11 landing in 1969.

“The scope of this is beyond the walls of General Motors,” Wexler said. “It’s beyond the planet. … We’ll apply our mobility platform literally out of this world, with the potential to drive science forward exponentially for all humankind. How could we pass this up?”

Kirk Shireman, vice president of Lunar Exploration Campaigns for Lockheed (NYSE: LMT) added, “There’s a scientific bounty on the moon.”

Shireman explained “The south polar basin of the moon is a unique place. It’s got the oldest impact craters, and there’s no wind or weather so it’s not eroded. We want to go and look at how the moon was formed, and possibly the Earth and our inner planet.”

Lockheed’s Waterton Campus southwest of Denver is home base for about 8,000 of the company’s 11,000 Colorado employees.

Officials at the news conference showed a brief video of some early-stage designs.

“We want to leverage our electric battery know-how, our engineers and learning applications,” said Jeff Ryder, vice president of Growth and Strategy for General Motors Defense. “It’s a challenge to operate in space, with extreme thermal environments, extreme temperature swings, nights that can last 14 days. Our engineers and scientists are up to the challenge to demonstrate our capabilities.

“You could call this an extreme off-road environment.”

GM (NYSE: GM) has pledged $27 billion to deliver all zero-emission vehicles by 2035.

Lockheed has extensive development history with robots, autonomy and robotic arms, proving the technology most recently with the Osiris-Rex spacecraft landing on asteroid Bennu to collect samples, said Lisa Callahan, vice president and general manager of Lockheed’s Commercial Civil Space.

“We’ll be able to infuse that technology, like a natural feature tracker,” Callahan said.

Osiris-Rex is flying back to Earth and expected to land in 2023.

Lockheed designed NASA’s Orion exploration-class spaceship for Artemis and numerous other Mars and planetary spacecraft.

“This alliance brings together powerhouse innovation from both companies to make a transformative class of vehicles,” Rick Ambrose, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space, said in a statement. “Surface mobility is critical to enable and sustain long-term exploration of the lunar surface. These next-generation rovers will dramatically extend the range of astronauts as they perform high-priority science investigation on the Moon that will ultimately impact humanity’s understanding of our place in the solar system.”