The Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) was taken during the Apollo 15 mission. Powered by battery, the lightweight electric car greatly increased the range
of mobility and productivity on the scientific traverses for astronauts. It weighed 462 pounds (77 pounds on the Moon). Credit: NASA
The difference it made:
Building a car for the Moon
By David Clow
Neil Armstrong set the first distance
record with an impromptu amble to
Little West crater. Pete Conrad and
Alan Bean exceeded that several
times over by circling out and down
into Surveyor Crater. Edgar Mitchell
still holds the title for longest one,
over a mile, made when he and
Alan Shepard went looking for Cone
Crater.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
photos tell the stories: for Apollo 11,
12 and 14, the dark trails scuffed in
the dust show tentative explorations
in this most dangerous place, where
even a short hike was risky, and time
was always precious. They were
Moon walks, and triumphant as they
were, they were frustratingly limited.
The astronauts on the first three
lunar landings crossed a quartermillion miles of space to investigate,
at most, a few hundred yards of
the lunar surface. Something more
was needed to turn Apollo into real
exploration.
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Out of the Cold War
The science fiction vision of driving
on the Moon actually preceded the
fact of driving on the Earth. It turned
real as the space race accelerated.
Cold War fear was an impetus as
much as peaceful scientific curiosity.
Military contractors such as Grumman, Northrup and Boeing, already
involved in lunar spacecraft design,
created speculations on lunar
surface vehicles of all configurations—one-man, two-man, long
traverse, short-hop, rolling RV-sized
habitations (the Mobile Laboratory,
“MOLAB”) that could carry multiple
crew and operate autonomously for
weeks at a time; even a rocket-belt
that would boost an astronaut on
twin hand-controlled jets.
Billions of dollars were at stake,
both for Apollo and for the permanently-based militarized Moon that
the Pentagon envisioned in its 1959
proposal for Project Horizon: “The
lunar outpost is required to develop
and protect potential United States
interests on the Moon; to develop
techniques in Moon-based surveillance of the earth and space, in
communications relay, and in operations on the surface of the Moon; to
serve as a base for exploration of
the Moon, for further exploration into
space and for military operations
on the Moon if required; and to support scientific investigations on the
Moon.”
The ambition boggled minds and
budgets: they set a deadline of 1966
to open the base, and planned
expansion in 1967 requiring a launch
schedule of over 200 Saturn I and II
boosters, a new launch complex on
the Equator; and a Vehicle Assembly
Building at Cape Canaveral with
six support bays for Apollo launch
vehicles.)
This was the Cold War crystallized:
money was no object and the
Earth was not big enough for it. Not
surprisingly, General Motors Defense
Research Laboratories (GMDRL) a
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