Washington, Sept 24: NASA's next-generation lunar explorers may live in mobile habitats and drive mini-RVs that can tool around for a week or more at a time, agency scientists have said.

The rovers would be about the same size as the electric dune buggies driven during the last three Apollo moon landings in 1971 and 1972, but would be enclosed and pressurized to better protect astronauts from radiation, extreme temperatures and other hazards.

Astronauts will also be equipped with more comfortable clothes, unlike the bulky spacesuits being used now, which has incidentally, changed very little since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s time.

According to a Discovery News report, for off-vehicle excursions, the new cars would have spacesuits fully assembled and attached to the rover so that astronauts could slip into them by opening a hatch and climbing inside.

“It would only take 10 minutes to get in the suit and be boots on the surface,” said astronaut Mike Gernhardt at a space symposium in Long Beach, California.

Gernhardt is working on NASA's post-shuttle space exploration program called Constellation, which aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2020.

He said the agency is also planning to have a pair of rovers, which can be outfitted for sojourns lasting up to two weeks.

Though the cost of the rovers has not yet been determined, NASA has pegged the price of the first moon landing, which includes development of a new launch system and lunar gear, at 104 billion dollars.

NASA experts say most of the funding for Constellation programs would come from the shutdown of the shuttle program in 2010 upon completion of the International Space Station (ISS). (With Inputs from ANI)