His book also explains that immigrant engineers, including Mieczyslaw Gregory Bekker, raised in Poland, and Ferenc Pavlics, who was born in Hungary, persevered despite large budget overruns, blown deadlines and technical challenges. “If it hadn’t been for a couple of engineers at General Motors, there wouldn’t have been a rover at all,” Mr. GM and Boeing engineers scrambled to finish their design in time for the final Apollo missions under threats that NASA would cancel the rover program before it ever left the ground. On the moon, it had to operate in temperature swings of more than 500 degrees Fahrenheit between sunlight and shade withstand abrasive lunar dust and micro-meteoroids traveling faster than bullets and cover a sharp, rugged surface that contained mountains, craters, loose gravel and powder. To travel along with the astronauts instead of using a separate rocket, the rover had to weigh less than 500 pounds, but bear twice that in human and geological cargo. Swift notes that some news reports at the time considered the rover an “inevitable, almost comic product of the most automotive people on Earth,” although there was nothing inevitable about this extraterrestrial horseless carriage.
“It provided a point of access, even as the exploration of the moon was becoming increasingly complex and complicated to follow.” The astronauts’ excitement, and their car, brought the Apollo missions back down to Earth, Dr. The white rock was later named Genesis Rock, because scientists initially thought it dated to the moon’s formation. “There’s a lot to unpack in that picture,” she added. A photo spread in Life magazine showed the astronauts posing with their iconic American muscle cars alongside the moon buggy, making the lunar rover look cool by association, Dr. The Apollo 15 crew chose red, white and blue Corvettes. Starting with Project Mercury in the 1960s, a Florida car dealer allowed astronauts to lease Chevrolet cars for $1, which were later sold to the public.
The rover’s exposed chassis, umbrella-like antenna and wire wheels meant it looked like no car on Earth, yet its connection to the American auto industry and the nation’s love affair with the automobile captivated public attention like nothing since Apollo 11, Dr. The moon car was also quintessentially American. “The lunar rover is, in some ways, relatively practical.” “There were other outlandish ideas, like a pogo stick, or a motorcycle - things that I am glad they didn’t pursue,” Dr. Swift describes it, “like an overgrown Tootsie Pop, with its spherical cabin up top of a single long leg, which in turn was mounted on a caterpillar-tread foot.” Ultimately, a carlike buggy came out on top. Throughout the 1960s, engineers studied a variety of concepts: tank-like tracked vehicles, flying cars, even a rotund monstrosity shaped, as Mr. Though moon buggies had been imagined for years, driving a car on the moon is more complicated than it sounds. But at the 50th anniversary of Apollo 15, which launched on July 26, 1971, some space enthusiasts, historians and authors are giving the lunar rover its due as one of the most enduring symbols of the American moon exploration program.įoldable, durable, battery-powered and built by Boeing and General Motors, the vehicle is seen by some as making the last three missions into the crowning achievement of the Apollo era. Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 are the NASA lunar missions that tend to be remembered most vividly. Like many lunar samples returned to Earth by the final Apollo missions, Seatbelt Rock never would have been collected if the astronauts had not brought a car with them. Scott described what he’d done, and “Seatbelt Rock” became one of the most prized geologic finds from Apollo 15. The sample was discovered when the astronauts returned to Earth, Mr.
Scott made up a story that they stopped the rover because he was fidgeting with his seatbelt. They also knew that if they asked for permission to stop and get it, clock-watching mission managers would say no. Irwin had been trained in geology and knew the specimen, a vesicular rock, would be valuable to scientists on Earth.
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Scott scrambled out of the rover and quickly picked up a black lava rock, full of holes formed by escaping gas.
After a 6-hour inaugural jaunt in the new lunar rover, the two were heading back to their lander, the Falcon, when Mr. It was July 31, 1971, and he and Jim Irwin, his fellow Apollo 15 astronaut, were the first people to drive on the moon. Dave Scott was not about to pass by an interesting rock without stopping.
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