the shelf and cut it to the right size,
rolled it into a cylinder and then knitted the ends into a torus shape.
“The 1/6 scale was perfect for the
passenger, an Astronaut G.I. Joe with
a silver Mercury-type space suit that I
borrowed from my son. My wife and
I made an Apollo backpack. She
helped to sew the folding seats. The
instrument panel and the steering
joystick, the wire wheels with the
titanium bumpers, the folding seats,
the way the front and rear sections
folded up and the wheels tucked in;
it was all accurate, all to scale. And
it was radio-controlled, so you could
unfold it, sit G. I. Joe in the seat, and
drive it on the floor.
“GM knew I was doing it,” he
continued, “but NASA was out of
the loop. We were trying to sell the
idea: look NASA, it’s possible to do
this! We went to NASA headquarters,
to Houston, and to Huntsville, and
gave presentations demonstrating
the model. We made a scale model
of the space in which it had to fold,
and showed how it worked.
“In Huntsville, we pitched the
engineering group. One of them, Len
Bradford, led the way to von Braun’s
office and he opened von Braun’s
door. Instead of going in, I put the
model Rover on the floor. von Braun
was on the phone and the model
drove in over his rug. He hung up
and said, ‘What the heck is this?’ We
gave him the presentation of how
it worked, how it folded. The week
after, he called in [NASA Project
Manager] Sonny Morea, and Morea
became the program manager to
develop the [Rover].
“NASA issued another Request for
Proposals. GM bid against Bendix
for the job; it was pro forma really,
because our folding and packaging
design couldn’t be duplicated. We
got the contract and we and Sonny
Morea had just 17 months to deliver
the Rover.”
Specifications
and pressure
It was to be a spacecraft every
bit as much as were the CM, the
LM and the EVA suits. Morea’s office
specified as absolute the requirement that “no single point failure
Close-up of the LRV tire exterior, showing the woven
piano wire and the titanium treads. A Delco Electronics press photo from the GM Public Relations
Department states, “The mesh is steel music wire,
0.033 inched in diameter, crimped at 3/16 inch
intervals, cut into 800 32-inch strands, and then
woven by hand and shaped to form a tire body. The
mesh, containing some 64,000 intersections of wire,
is mounted to a spun aluminum disc. The herringbone tread strips are made of titanium for abrasion
resistance. Inside the tire, titanium bumper rings
limit deflection of the mesh as the wheel bumps on
the lunar terrain.” Credit: David Clow
shall abort the mission and no second failure endanger the crew,” so
regardless of the deceptive simplicity
of it, and the casual sense of familiarity its design and the nicknames
like “Moon buggy” invited, the LRV
was subject to the same inviolable
standards as all the rest of the Apollo
hardware. The unprecedented challenges included creating a vehicle
that had to:
• deploy safely in 1/6 G from the
bay on the LM Descent Stage and
be operable within 15 minutes or
so;
• operate in a vacuum with temperatures between ±250 degrees
Fahrenheit;
• permit ease of use by drivers wearing bulky protective suits;
• cross obstacles a foot high and
over two feet deep;
• work without a transmission and
gears, using instead four motors,
one for each wheel, and operate
if three of the four motors were
out;
• permit the operators to venture
miles from, and out of sight of, the
Lunar Module while still being able
to return to it in the minimal time,
that is, not by retracing their path
but by the most direct route;
• communicate via television and
radio (voice and telemetry) with
Houston in real time for the performance of both astronauts and the
LRV, plus in support of the scientific
objectives at each location visited;
• protect itself from temperature
extremes and dust, and dissipate
its own heat;
• weigh only about 450 pounds in
1G, about 75 in 1/6 G, and carry
more than twice its weight;
• climb grades as steep as 25 degrees, and remain stationary when
parked on a grade of 45 degrees;
• turn in a radius equal to its own
length;
• provide real-time feedback on its
condition to the operators and to
Mission Control; isolate faults in its
batteries and take corrective action; and
• deliver maximized freedom of
movement for the greatest possible scientific exploration of every
site.
It also had to do something no
spacecraft to date had done: operate without ever having been tested
under actual working conditions. Its
first Apollo EVA would be its shakedown cruise, over two kilometers out
in the Apennines past Rhysling and
Elbow, then looping back along the
gaping Rima Hadley on the way
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