There was also the lack of gravity and the extreme temperatures. At the time no one was 100% sure exactly what the lunar surface was made of and how tracks or wheels would gain purchase. They showed it to him and legend has it that he slammed his fist down on his desk and said ‘Ve must do this!’ and the rest is history.”īuilding a vehicle on Earth that could navigate on the Moon had many challenges. So Pavlics made a one-sixth scale model of it, and he and his boss Sam Romano took it to Huntsville, (Alabama) to the Marshall Space Flight Center where (Wernher) von Braun was the director. It weighed next to nothing, it was minimalist, but it was a pretty viable idea. A tiny, aluminum go-cart that could fold like a business letter and fit inside the one cargo bay that was available on the lander.
#Lunar vehicle trial
“And a Hungarian refugee named Ferenc Pavlics, Frank to his American friends, came up, after four months of trial and error, with a folding rover. That didn’t stop engineers in private companies from continuing their research. But in the late 60s, NASA’s budget was cut and they abandoned the idea of having a rover during the Apollo missions. So they needed a compact design that could be carried on the existing lunar module. Anything that large would require a second Saturn 5 rocket to deliver it to the moon. It also became obvious that the vehicle would have to be much smaller than the original concept. It was obvious from early on that after the first few (moon) flights, the astronauts were going to need to drive if they were going to fulfill all of the potential of the missions to the moon.”
#Lunar vehicle how to
It moved into high gear in the early to mid-1960s, with companies like G.M., Boeing, Grumman, Bendix all studying concepts on how to best move astronauts around.
And then you see private industry start nosing around on the idea in the very late 50s. “Enormous, hulking Caterpillar-tractor style rovers with pressurized tanks that could travel for 500 miles. Then, in the early 1950s, almost a decade before President John Kennedy issued his “end of the decade moon challenge”, former German SS Officer turned American rocket scientist Wernher von Braun wrote an article for Colliers Magazine describing land vehicles that could operate on the lunar surface. Lunar rovers have existed in science fiction since the beginning of the 20 th Century. On the last mission, on Apollo 17, Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt drove more than 22 miles, and at one point they were very close to five miles away from their lunar module.” (During) Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin walked an area that was smaller than a football field you could fit all of their wanderings into a football field with a lot of yardage left over. "The first three, the astronauts were on foot (and) the final three they drove the rover. “We sent six missions up (to the moon, seven if you count Apollo 13 which never landed on the Moon)" said Swift. It’s called “Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings." "The fact is that the rover changed everything,” said Earl Swift, an author, and journalist whose new book chronicles the story of the moon mobiles. Officially called the Lunar Roving Vehicle, it was a part of the final three Apollo missions and dramatically changed those moon missions. That's what astronauts Dave Scott and Jim Irwin said as they took the first lunar rover out for a shakedown.
The Eagle has landed." And of course "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." But do you remember an astronaut on the surface of the Moon saying "This is a rock and rolling ride!" In the 50 years since the Apollo missions took man to the moon there are a lot of images and sounds that have become a part of our history.
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