Schramm said the agency hopes that RFID technology can be used to monitor and manage inventory on a spacecraft, and to track internal and external environmental conditions both on the mission to the moon and future manned flights to Mars.

'If you think of the moon, that's not very far-- it's only a few days away, but Mars is 34 million miles away,' Schramm said.

'If you think of going to Mars, you carry a lot of stuff with you,' said Schramm. He also noted that astronauts cannot immediately input data into systems when working outside a spacecraft on a mission, which could lead to mistakes. RFID technology could solve that problem, he noted.

'If they're inside,' he added, 'we'd rather have them doing other things. We want automatic inventory registration,' he said. For instance, if a food package is passed from one cabin to another for an astronaut to eat, the RFID-enabled system would register that the package is no longer available.

If the technology is found to work under such conditions, Schramm said, RFID tags could also be placed on any part of a spacecraft and on anything inside it, allowing data to be transported directly to a local network within the spacecraft or signaled directly back to Earth, he said.