Lunar Rover No.1, is stowed inside the Apollo 15 Lunar Module at the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. When completely
stowed, all four wheels of the LRV are folded against the chassis. Credit: NASA via Retro Space Images
race, none of them worked. They
were too costly, too ambitious for
the mission profiles, and above all
just too heavy to carry. When reality
was being measured in terms of
grams and ever-tighter dollars, the
lunar surface vehicle designers were
still imagining in terms of tons, and
eventually they had to concede the
obvious. For Apollo, there would be
no two-week surface expeditions, no
separate Saturn cargo launches to
place machines up there.
The need was bare-bones simple:
aboard a single Saturn launch
along with everything else needed
for a mission, a vehicle that would
be stripped to the minimum, used
flawlessly but only once, and abandoned.
By 1967, when there were no realistic proposals on the table and the
clock was ticking down to President
Kennedy’s deadline, NASA said it
could not be done.
But the hope was just too good
for General Motors to leave behind,
and the need was obvious. The most
scientifically promising places on the
Moon were also the most hazardous
to reach; and what was the point
of risking a landing at a site like the
10
10
Apennines or Taurus-Littrow if the safe
radius of walking exploration was half
a mile around the LM?
However, developing a spacecraft
took five years by the most optimistic
schedule, and the ones for the Command Module and the Lunar Module
had proven unrealistic. “This is 1967,
1968,” Pavlics remembered, “and it’s
really late in the program to create a
new vehicle that could be ready.
“North American already has to
redesign the Command Module
after the fire. The LM is behind
schedule too. So NASA’s path is set. It
was 1968 or so when they cancelled
MOLAB and it looked like it was all
done for vehicles. Then, independent
research and development money
provided by GM was used in our
study—even if NASA did not want to
pursue this, we still did.
“We did a study of how to create
a vehicle to all the required specs
and fit it either inside or attached to
the outside of the existing LM. We
went to NASA headquarters and
talked with the brass and asked,
can you identify what space might
be available on the LM? We were
also in contact with Grumman. They
said, well, this small corner could
be made available. Whatever was
in there could be repositioned and
the space freed up—we could use
that much for whatever GM came
up with. They we came home and
started figuring it out.”
The “small corner” was inside the
descent stage to the right of the
ladder as one faces the LM. It was
“a triangular bay 60 inches high,
70 inches wide at the base, and 36
inches deep”…. just over thirty cubic
feet, and the shape of it narrowed
from the broad end to a point like a
tall, wide slice of layer cake. “Figuring it out,” as Pavlics put it, meant
visualizing a way “to store a Jeep size
vehicle carrying a payload of 1,200
pounds into a space not larger than
the back of a station wagon.” The
solution Pavlics figured out changed
the Apollo program.
“I came up with this idea of folding
the vehicle,” he said, “but nobody
could really visualize it. That’s why
I built a little 1/6 scale model and
with that, people could see it. Some
of the pieces that needed machining we did in the shop at GM, but
I made most of it and assembled
it here at home. [For the wheels] I
bought some stainless steel mesh off
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