wing of one of the most powerful
companies in history as the space
race gained momentum, wanted in.
Mieczyslaw Bekker was head of
the Mobility Research Laboratory
at GMDRL. Born in Poland 1905 and
graduated from Warsaw Technical
University in 1929, Bekker had worked
for the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs, doing pioneering research offroad traction for tracked vehicles.
The German invasion of Poland
forced his group to flee to Romania
and then, in 1939, to France, where
in 1942 the government of Canada
offered him a chance to move to Ottawa. After 13 years in the Canadian
army, he retired and in 1956 moved
to the United States.
Bekker’s 1956 Theory of land
locomotion: the mechanics of
vehicle mobility was a forerunner of
engineering in off-road vehicles that
would help lead in the development
of their ultimate expressions. In 1956,
Bekker was hunting for talent. As
a former refugee himself, he knew
where to look.
Ferenc Pavlics was on his way to a
GM job in Detroit. In 1960 GM moved
the Defense Research Laboratories
to Santa Barbara, with lunar vehicles
on the agenda, and wheeled tracks
in the lunar regolith—possibly—just a
few years away.
Limited time,
many questions
It is worth reminding ourselves how
little was actually known about the
Moon at the time. The most effective exploratory tool in 1960 was the
same one Galileo had used three
centuries earlier: the telescope.
Pavlics and his colleagues were
designing for a surface whose nature
they did not know. Scientists such as
Cornell’s Dr. Thomas Gold speculated that it might not be a “surface” at
Ferenc Pavlics
Ferenc Pavlics was newly-arrived
in the United States. He and his wife
had made a harrowing escape from
Hungary after the uprising that had
nearly thrown off Soviet control and
then provoked a vicious response
from Moscow.
Pavlics had been working as a
design engineer at the Machine
Industry Design Institute in Budapest
and teaching at night at the Technical University of Budapest. He and his
wife crossed the border into Austria
past canine patrols and Soviet
soldiers. Pavlics was carrying his own
KGB file; had he been caught they
would surely have been severely
punished.
After months of waiting and
uncertainty, the Pavlics committed
themselves to go to America, and
along with 4,000 of their countrymen,
they boarded a re-commissioned
World War II troop carrier.
Almost 40,000 refugees were
received in Camp Kilmer, a reactivated military base in New Jer