June 1, 2022 • 41 mins
Why did we send a car to the moon? How did we design something for an environment we knew nothing about? How did we get it up there? Plus: a behind-the-scenes peek at GM’s current lunar rover project.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey Eddie here, before we get started, I wanted
you to know that you can listen to Car Show
ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. You'll also
get access to detours, bonus episodes of Car Show, where
we go for extended drives, play outtakes, and more fine
(00:37):
Pushkin Plus on the Car Show page, in Apple Podcasts,
or at pushkin dot Fm. What the hell were they
doing with a car on the goddamn moon? You're on
the Moon already. Isn't that far enough? There is no
(01:01):
more male idea in the history of the universe than
why don't we fly up to the Moon and drive around? Well, exactly, Jerry,
why shouldn't we drive around on the moon. By sending
those lunar rovers into space, NASA made it clear getting
to the Moon wasn't far enough. Once up there, we
(01:21):
had to keep going. There are three lunar rovers, three
American cars up there on the Moon right now. They
were disgorged from the bellies of Apollo fifteen, sixteen and
seventeen's lunar modules, and we left them at Hadley, Apennine,
the Descartes Highlands and Taurus lit Row, respectively. In the
(01:44):
nineteen seventies, because we were litter bugs back then, also
because getting them down would have been almost as impossible
as getting them up there in the first place. The
rovers purpose was to explore the surface of the Moon
and collect geological samples. NASA wanted to see how the
Moon was formed. The Rovers were like, yeah, getting to
(02:05):
the Moon is cool and all, but here, hold my beer.
Lunar exploration is an idea that hasn't really left us,
even though we stopped going to the Moon fifty years ago,
but NASA plans to go back by the year twenty
twenty five as part of a project called Artemis. It's
also on many billionaires to do lists like Ancient Rome.
(02:28):
Our biggest ideas are now funded by ultra rich shopkeepers
and stupid looking cowboy hats. Two one honestly human and
amazing what we just saw for the team at Blue
Origin and Jeff Bezos takes the first ride, so I
(02:50):
think it's pretty exciting. I think it opens up or
funded by his arch nemesis, evil genius spacebro Musk. You
got a contract with the Defense Department to do a
lunar lander if rom NASA from NASA, which is being
disputed by Jeff Bezos. How do you feel about that?
I think he should put more of his energy into
(03:12):
getting to orbit. You cannot seat the moon. Okay, do
you know how good your lawyers are? Yeah, boys will
be boys. Meanwhile, NASA did it already and left proof
up there in those three lonely rovers. The lunar rovers
(03:33):
were compact miracles of research and engineering, imagination and blind faith.
They were perilous things animated by the spirit of ceaseless exploration.
They were exploration vehicles squared. They were the Moonshots Moonshot.
(03:54):
I'm Eddie Alterman, and this is Car Show, my podcast
about how cars reflect who we are. The lunar rovers
count as cars definitely. They had four wheels, bidirectional steering,
and lots of communications puipment. They were battery powered, making them,
in a manner of speaking, the first ev off rods. Moreover,
(04:17):
as we'll see in this episode, the winning rover design
made it through the approvals process because it was so familiar,
so carlike. It was a concrete and reassuring connection to
what was already known, and when you're dealing with the
many unknowns of a moon mission, a little familiarity is comforting.
(04:37):
But beyond all that, there is this. If cars are
about exploration, freedom and travel, then the Lunar rovers might
be the carrious cars in the history of mankind. We
(05:08):
loved to drive our subjects here on the show, but
from time to time will encounter vehicles where a drive
is out of the budget. So we'll do the next
best thing. We'll talk with people close to the Rover project,
people like Earl Swift, who wrote Across the Airless Wilds,
which is, in my humble opinion, the definitive book on
the Lunar rovers. Thank you so much for having me. Swifts.
(05:31):
Across the Airless Wilds chronicles the unlikely origins of the
Lunar Rover project, which was first streamed up by Werner
von Braun. Von Braun was born into aristocracy. His father
was part of the Weimar Republic. As a teenager, von
Braun became obsessed with rockets, and the German government took notice.
(05:51):
They paid for him to further his studies. Von Braun,
a card carrying member of the SS, would go on
to develop advanced weapons systems for the Nazis. America covertly
patriated him after World War Two as part of Project
paper Clip. In the States, he worked on rocket development,
and he would eventually become director of the Marshall Space
(06:12):
Flight Center in Alabama. There he developed a Saturn V
rocket that got us to the Moon, but not before
guest starring in promotional films about space flight for Disneyland.
The training methods for future space flight and the special
equipment needed for survival are much like those of present
high altitude flying, and the experiments we are making today
(06:35):
are helping us to solve the more complex problems to come.
Take the present days. Von Bronze in the running with
movie star codemaker and inventor Hetty Lamar for Craziest resume
of the twentieth century. In the early fifties, he participated
in a series of stories in Collier's magazine. The series
(06:58):
explored the inevitability of the American entry into space. In
the Collier series, von Braun laid out his vision for
how we would get around on the Moon's surface. How
wild is it that the idea of lunar mobility should
spring from von Bron's mind and onto the pages of
a magazine, and a general interest magazine at that, not
(07:19):
popular science, not even popular mechanics Collier's Weekly. That's akin
to laying out a vision for nuclear fission in a
special section of people. Vron Brown was speculating about a
visit to a place that people a lot more learned
about the celestial bodies. They knew way more than he did,
(07:40):
but that didn't stop him from dreaming. Dominating von Braun's
vision were, as Swift calls them, these hulking, multitn caterpillar
tractor sized moon cars. Von Braun imagined them traveling hundreds
of miles across the lunar surface, carrying small squadrons of
astronauts on exploratory missions. Of course, that's not how it
(08:03):
ended up. There were several rover ideas floating around NASSA
at that time, and they all contributed to what ultimately
wound up tucked into the bellies of those three lunar modules.
In fact, NASA's manned spacecraft vision for lunar exploration stayed
true to that early vision. The first lunar rovers were
(08:23):
expected to be pressurized and capable of traveling long distances,
and we're going to kind of double as shelter as
well as transportation. The astronauts wouldn't live in a lunar module.
They'd get out of the module, step into this big
lunar rover and they drive around and live in that
thing for a couple of weeks and then fly home. Meanwhile,
(08:44):
and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, another crew of
engineers was working on a different vision for a mission
to the Moon, and there you see a much more
simplified concept of of what a rover would look like.
Of course, they were they had to be simplified. They
were very small, they were they were robotic, and they
were going to land on unmanned probes and then explore
(09:05):
the lunar's surface for good places for manned language to occur.
Both of those concepts you see one group of engineers
at General Motors. It's kind kind of working both concepts
at the same time. What we wound up with was
sort of a mashup of the enclosed Vombrounian idea of
(09:26):
what the lunar rover would look like and the pared
down Jet Propulsion Labs concept more like a beach buggy. Interestingly,
although we think of the Moon as an extension of
American manifest destiny, the guys leading the development of the
lunar rover weren't born here. Von Braun, as we mentioned,
was German, and while von Braun was working for NASA,
(09:49):
two Europeans working for General Motors were also key to
the rover story. They were there at the beginning working
on everything from rough rover prototypes to the final vehicles
still sitting on the moon. The two engineers at General
Motors who had the single prints all over this project
from the beginning guide named Qui Becker from Poland and
(10:11):
his right hand man parents Frank Pablix, who was from Hungary.
They came over in Becker's case right after the war,
and Pablix's case in the mid nineteen sixties after the
unsuccessful Hungarian uprising, and became Americans and became the guiding
(10:34):
spirits of the whole project. Becker and Pavlicks were not
plugging away in the frozen hinterlands of Detroit, though. These
guys got the plumb assignment go to California and dream
stuff up. Santa Barbara was home to GM's defense research labs,
which focused on winning military business. This tells you something
(10:57):
important about General Motors at that time. They were so omnipotent,
so vital to and in meshed with our country's success
that they had their own experimental department full of these
austral hung Arean engineers who were there to theorize about
blowing things up. They weren't there to get their hands
dirty and actually produce something. Another division would handle that.
(11:22):
But when push came to shove, they did produce something.
The idea that we went from imagining the basic notion
of how to get to the Moon in nineteen sixty
two to driving around on it just nine years later.
That's nuts. It takes me nine years just to clean
my basement. The first thing Becker did was trying to
(11:43):
work out the soil composition on the Moon, not the terrain,
but the lurine. You know, if you've ever done munting
in a jeep, or you've raced motocross or just ridden
a mountain bike, you owe something of the experience to
Greg Becker because he invented the branch of engineering that
studies the relationship of vehicles to the soils over which
(12:04):
they travel. So that takes some tread design vehicle weight
versus type of ground uron Every factor that comes into
plays to whether you can gain traction and go somewhere
off road goes back to Greg Becker. Thus was born
the science of terra mechanics, the study of wheeled or
track vehicles across terrain. But Becker wasn't designing a vehicle
(12:27):
for just any dirt. It's hard to get more off
road than the Moon. How did Greg Becker know what
was up there? Well, that's that is. Of course, no
one knew what was up there. The only thing that
was known about the Moon's surface was what could be
seen through telescopes, and given the telescopes of the day,
(12:48):
that wasn't a lot. But they made a number of assumptions.
Number one thing, you know, there wasn't believed to be
any water on the Moon. Therefore you're dealing with a dry,
granular soil. And wasn't there a fear that the surface
was so soft, like a talc softness, that anything would
sort of sink into it. Well, there was a There
(13:11):
was a scientist named Thomas Gold who was really his
comments on it were taking out of context. He in
a nineteen fifty five or fifty six paper, had postulated
that what we saw as seas on the lunar's surface
were actually settled dust in places that could be thousands
(13:32):
of feet thick, and really was reporters of the day
who then kind of took that in extrapolated from it
this notion that if a spacecraft came down on the
lunar surface, it might finish out of side, it might
sink into this dry lunar quicksand never to be seen again.
But Becker and Pavlix were undeterred. They experimented with all
(13:55):
sorts of prototypes, and it was Becker's belief that by
grinding up volcanic rock and similar materials he could fake it,
and so he and Pablix did just that. They used
a number of substitutes, these flour white flour, and wound
open a bit of a rat problem in Santa Barbara
because of that. But Pavlex and Becker came up with
(14:18):
one design for a rober bit was composed of screws
basically that would just burrow through a really soft, light,
fluffy surface. But it became clear that over a couple
of years of experimentation that the mode of travel that
made the most sense when you looked at complexity and
weight versus what you were likely to find on the
(14:40):
learner's surface was the wheel, the rover's wheel. It's engineering
and materials would be key to this whole project and
would ultimately land Boeing in GM the final NASA contract.
That wheel would take time to work out using the
new science of Tera mechanics, but the number of wheels
(15:02):
that was something Becker and Pablox thought they knew from
the start. The earliest GM proposals by Becker and Ablets
were six wheels, all wheel drive, which they found was
the perfect setup to get over practically anything. Wasn't there
a variety of articulation types of the body, Well, it
(15:22):
absolutely essential to the six wheel prototype that they developed
was the fact that it had a completely flexible frame.
You know, if it came to a block ahead, it
could climb it first with the front wheels kind of
you know, pulling their way up as the back two
sets pushed. And then once the front wheels got to
the top of the obstacle, you'd have the front wheels
(15:45):
pulling while the back wheels pushed and the middle wheels
clawed their way up. And then finally you'd have two
sets of wheels up front pulling while that last set
of wheels went over. So why did they go to
four wheels. They went to four wheels because they didn't
have a choice. They were still pushing a six wheeled
rover as late as nineteen the fall of nineteen sixty seven,
(16:06):
at which point NASA's budget was slap and the agency
basically threw up at sands and said, we're not going
to be able to afford to the cinder or rover
to the Moon. Becker and Pavlik's original rover concepts relied
on two rockets to reach the surface of the Moon,
one carrying astronauts and another carrying the hulking six wheeled rover.
(16:29):
And with the budget cut that flew out the window.
No Apollo mission was going to get two rockets. But
at this point they've been They spent seventy eight years
working on this NonStop, and they weren't content to let
all that work go to waste. They would need to
find some space in the tiny lunar module itself, and
Becker and Pavox weren't the only engineers whose work was
(16:50):
upended by the budget cuts. As they began working frantically
to downsize the original rover design. Three other companies Vibe
to deliver the winning design to Werner von Braun at NASA.
The three were Chrysler, Grummin and Fendix. Bendix came up
with a minimum number of moving parts approach. Forget sophistication,
(17:12):
forget elegance. We just don't want anything to go wrong,
so we're going to cut anything that can. Bendix put
the bulk of their energy into the all important wheels.
They devised a spoked aluminum hub with titanium hoops at
its crown, surrounded by a titanium band. The idea was
that if the Bendix rover hid an obstacle, the titanium
(17:35):
hoops would compress, observing the shock of the impact. Then
once the rover was past the obstacle, the titanium would
pop back into shape. Wheel and suspension in one wasn't
good looking. It looked like it had been fashioned in
an old West blacksmith shop, but it worked pretty well. Meanwhile,
(17:55):
over at Chrysler, the design team there was working on
a rover with a much smaller footprint. The two astronauts
would sit back to back on a much narrower platform,
but there was a cost to the Chrysler's slim profile
didn't leave much cargo space for collecting lunar rock samples
and collecting samples was the whole point of the rover.
(18:16):
And finally there was the team over at Grumman working
up their own idea for the rover, a crouching spidery looking.
It really looked like a spacecraft on wheels. Grumman's design
had wheel shaped like flower pots turned on their sides.
They compressed over the Lorraine. They were sort of comically floppy. Also,
(18:37):
the Grumman design didn't have traditional steering, just a joystick
at the front. When an astronaut moved the joystick, the
entire craft would contort itself and pivot, and it was fast.
It's crouching attitude gave it almost the sports per field.
But in the end Werner von Braunze said no to
all three. Grumman's space spider was just too weird for NASA.
(19:06):
The Chrysler didn't have enough cargo capacity to elect geological samples,
and Bendix's design seemed rudimentary. And then, in the spring
of nineteen sixty eight, just four months after the budget cuts,
who should walk into von Braun's office our Man Fern's
pavlis carrying a one six scale model of an ingeniously
(19:27):
redesigned GM rover. Pavlis proposed a four wheeled rover that
can fold into thirds, like how you'd fold a letter
to fit in an envelope. The reduction in the number
of wheels plus the associated origami meant that this rover
could be stowed in the lunar module. NASA wouldn't need
two rockets after all, the seats folded flat and both
(19:51):
axles folded back over the center section. And while Pavlicks
had to pare down his wheel count from six to four,
the wheels themselves were a feat of Terra mechanical genius
mesh donuts woven from stainless steel piano wire reinforced with
titanium hoops inside and compile at Chevron's for traction laid
over the wire, eight hundred threads of it woven into
(20:15):
a tight mesh. Each space between the threads was about
three sixteenth of an inch wide. That was the outer balloon,
the tire, if you will, of the wheel mounted onto
a spun aluminum hub, and then inside you had a
treis of titanium hoops that served as a bump stop.
So if you hit something really hard and you deformed
(20:36):
that outside mesh tire and the titanium hoop would keep
the deformity from going into deeper Legend has it when
von Braun saw Pablock's redesign, he slammed his fist on
the desktop and shouted, V must do this. There are
many brilliant elements of Pablock's vision, but perhaps most crucial
was that his GM rover felt familiar somehow. It wasn't
(21:00):
a spartan medieval hauler or a futuristic spider. It was,
in essence a car. It followed the precepts of, you know,
an American Earth car GM product of the late nineteen
sixty The power plant, mainly two thirty six bolt batteries,
was up front, the astronauts sat side by side of midships,
(21:23):
and then the trunk was in the back. It was
really the first ev that General motors produced correct at
least yes since the very early twentieth century. Has originally
proposed it was going to be rechargeable. You'd be able
to put up a solar array and recharge the thing
in NASA killed that as an unnecessary complication. Von Braun
(21:46):
spent the next year navigating NASA's bureaucracy and Production of
Pavlick's Rover began in the fall of nineteen sixty nine.
GM partner with Boeing for the build, and NASA gave
them a due date of March nineteen seventy one, a
little less than a year and a half. NASA usually
took three or four years to develop a piece of hardware.
(22:06):
This was crazily fast, and the breakneck production calendar wasn't
the only complication, you know, it's it's funny. In the book,
one of my favorite passages is the frustration that NASA
is having with Boeing and General Motors, sort of in
that order. NASA is working to this crazy set of
(22:31):
standards where absolutely nothing can go wrong. And it was
you know, everything was on the science, you know, everything
was instrumented flight. But General motors they're making sixty nine
Vista cruisers. They're making Camaros. In fairness to General Motors.
Now fair in mind, this has nothing to do with
(22:52):
Camber motors in Detroit. So these are not the same
people that are building the Vega think you know, the
Santa Barbara operation. This was an idea factory. These guys
were never planning to actually build any of the stuff.
They came up with. So what you have here a
bunch of serrists, fantastic engineers, great at building prototypes, but
(23:12):
not at all schools and actually building a production vehicle.
And suddenly they're thrust into a situation where not only
do they have to build the most carefully constructed vehicle
in human history, but they have to do it in
seventeen months. All they have is kind of a bag design.
(23:35):
When they go into it, they know nothing about. NASA's
weregorous testing procedures, which take months and are just numbingly repetitive,
you know. They were unfamiliar with a culture in which
if a piece broke you had to write reports in
triplicate detailing every test that you then put that broken
piece to to find out why it had broken. And
(23:56):
so it was a clash of cultures to bureaucratic obstacles, however,
pale next to the scientific challenges. There was no way
to simulate actually drive in accurately anyway. In one subscriber,
equipment from the previous Apollo missions had been tested in
space before liftoff. The lunar module and the command module
had been flown into low Earth orbit as sort of
(24:18):
dry runs, but there was simply no way to test
the rover in the environment for which it was intended.
For one thing, putting earthweight astronauts in a one sex
or moon mass rover would destroy the thing. They could
test the wheels out in the sands of California, but
not the rover itself. There was no way to predict
(24:40):
exactly how it would behave in those conditions. Yeah, a
lot of it was pure mass and good engineering, really
pretty visionary stuff. We're so jaded to the conveniences of
twenty first century life. We're talking Stone Age stuff here.
When we talked about Apollo, you know, stuff that was
worked out on blackboards and was five rules. We'll hear
(25:04):
how it all worked out after the break. As much
of a success story as the rover eventually became, some
stuff did go wrong. On a Pole fifteen, the first
(25:26):
lunar rover mission, astronaut Dave Scott climbed into the driver's
seat shortly after touchdown on the Moon, only to discover
that the front steering wasn't working. Thankfully, it was just
a brief electrical glitch, but steering issues cropped up again
on a Polo sixteen and then later in that second
rover mission, things got really gnarly. John Young, the mission commander,
(25:51):
as he was walking past the erber, snagged beat the
right wear fender extension with a hammer that was jutting
out of a pocket on her shin and ripped it off.
Without that fender extension, the werber picked up a rooster
tail of dust wherever it went, and you did not
need high speeds to achieve that rooster tail. I mean,
(26:11):
these guys were going six miles an hour most of
the time. They topped out at like eight, and that
was an uncomfortably fast drive. But the result was that
this dust got propelled onto the astronauts, onto the electronics.
A cloud of fine moon dust might not sound like
a big deal, but it's highly abrasive. Scientists have described
(26:32):
it as fine as flour and rough as sandpaper that
gets into any moving part and you're screwed over two
hundred thousand miles from home. On top of all of that,
if that dust got into the rover's electrical system, it
would absorb the blazing heat from the sun and fry
the circuits and so working overnight. John Young put together
(26:54):
a solution, and they picked the fender with maps duct
tape and two clamps, good old duct tape. Can you
imagine how cool headed these guys are? Well, yeah, I
mean you kind of understand Nassis requirement that they all
be test pilots. You go, you fall quarter million miles there,
and you get into a car, You get into a
(27:15):
nineteen sixty nine General Motors product. And I don't know, lady,
if you've owned any nineteen sixty nine General Motors products,
but I've owned two of it. I had two Oldsmobiles,
just a Cruiser in a cutless convertible, and I loved
both of those cars. But you would advasked me, you know,
would you be willing to get behind the wheel of
that cutless convertible a quarter million miles from home and
(27:38):
drive out of sight of your one way home. I
might have to think about that. Those nineteen sixty nine
General Motors projects took us past the known known, allowing
us to make good on the promise of Apolo eleven,
Because why go up there if we're not going to
see what the moon is all about, if it's habitable,
(28:00):
if it's volcanic, if there's water. Apollo eleven, in case
you're having a hard time keeping your mission strait is
the famous Neil Armstrong Buzz Aldrin voyage. One small step
for a man, one giant leap for mankind. But in
some ways the lunar rover missions were even greater leaps.
(28:23):
Armstrong and Aldron's mandate was relatively simple. Land on the
most boring piece of real estate on the Moon, the
Sea of Tranquility, totally flat, no obstacles, walk around for
a couple hours, get back in the ship, meet up
with the orbiter, and fly home. Easy. But the farthest
(28:44):
Armstrong and Aldrin got from the lunar module was sixty
five yards. And here's maybe the key point about the rovers.
Every mission before the lunar rovers was a prelude to
the real science, the real interrogation of the Moon's surface.
Apollos eleven through fourteen were really just equipment testing. The
(29:05):
guys from a polar fourteen, you know, the walking only
as far as they can walk in their spacesuits, and
just simple movement in that spacesuit was taxing as you
used muscle just to shuffle forward or the bunny hop.
Your metabolic radius increasing, which increases your consumption of the
(29:26):
air in cooling water, your backpack which limits the amount
of time you can stay outside. The radius of a
Polo war team was about half a mile. You were
really limited in radius. On the next mission, Apollo fifteen,
the crew of Dave Scott and Jim Irwin covers seventeen
and a quarter miles in their GM rover. It just
completely remade the mission. When Dave Scott and Jim Irwin
(29:49):
got into that rover, they covered more in their first
thirteen minutes in the car than all of the previous
missions had covered on the liner surface. From Bile, those
guys climbed the side of a mountain the sides of Kilimanjaro,
went hundreds of feet up up the side of it.
They explored the edge of a canyon that was a
mile wide and thousand feet deep with the PUBLICI team.
(30:11):
For the first time, you have a mission that doesn't
have except for testing the rover on that first drive,
doesn't have a developmental angle to it. It's pure science
and exploration. They explored all right. With the GM rovers.
Our astronauts went farther and brought back more stuff than
(30:32):
ever could have happened otherwise. They went a total of
fifty six miles on the three emissions. It was a
total game changer, and what they brought back in their
rock bags was key to finding out how the Moon's
surface developed. Scott and Irwin discovered what's known as the
Genesis rock. Genesis rock was a piece of a north
(30:53):
of site, which is a mineral that was thought to
be part of the original lunar crust. You know, one
of the things that it's valuable about the Moon from
a scientific standpoint is that it's been dead since infancy.
So while you know, the Earth is this very dynamic
place with with changes wrought by oceans and by volcanoes
(31:16):
and by uh, you know, continental drift, the Moon's is
as it as it was, you know, four and a
half billion years ago, largely the only changes that have
come to it have been brought by meteorite striking it.
So it makes it really valuable if you're looking at
the origins of the universe to go there to get
(31:37):
a beat on on how things work. Yeah, yeah, in
its way, and it's dead, terrible desolate way. And you know,
the North Site, because it was part of the thought
to be part of the original lunar crust, was was
something that NASA really put a priority on. It was
a holy grail, and Dave Scott and Jimmer, when founded
(31:59):
on their second drive and were well trained enough as geologists,
they recognized immediately what it was that they were holding
in their hands. The bright white Genesis Rock was thought
to be ejected from the crust after a meteorite hit
the Moon's surface. The Genesis rock showed that the Moon's
later topography was shaped by stuff hitting it, but that
(32:21):
the moon was also very early on volcanic. Not bad
for a day's work. Why did it stop? Apollo? Money?
In a word, money, I mean, you have to remember this,
This is all occurring while we're mired in Vietnam. We
(32:48):
are dealing with just terrible societal problems at home, none
of which seemed easy to fix except by spending an
awful lot of money and a polishifting costs. Four hundred
and forty five million dollars. Four hundred forty five million
(33:08):
bucks is a lot of money anytime, but this was
nineteen seventy one. That's over three billion dollars in today's money.
And that was just the Apollo fifteen price tag. The
Apolopo Ram, for all of its achievements, had one really
serious drawback, and that was that virtually all of the
equipment used to reach those achievements was used once and
(33:31):
thrown away. The Lunar rover made a remarkable journey from
the pages of Colliers Weekly in the early fifties to
the surface of the Moon in nineteen seventy one, and
then just like that, the mission was over. We left
the Moon, and we left our rovers behind, literally and figuratively.
(33:56):
Who knows what might have happened if the project continued.
How much further along in the development of electric vehicles
would we be and would there be all inclusive resorts
up there on that Descartes highlands. Look up the Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter camera from Arizona State University and you can
zoom in on the landing sites. You can see the
(34:17):
tire tracks, and you can follow over the tire tracks
for miles across the Learner surface. We'll soon go back
up there to create more tire tracks and hopefully discover
more than we were able to the first round. NASA's
(34:40):
Artemis program plans to get us back to the Moon
for the first time in fifty years. The current timetable
has Americans landing on the Moon in twenty twenty four,
NASA plans to put a permanent colony on the Moon
and use it as a platform for travel to Mars
and once again, General motors is busy at the drafting table,
(35:00):
But unlike those early Apollo missions, the goal this time
around isn't just about exploration. What's really interesting about this
particular series of missions is that the intent is a
long term habitation, or a colonization of the Moon, if
you will. That's Jeffrey Neil who's working to design the
new lunar rover for Artemis. So yes, perhaps we'll get
(35:21):
our vacation homes up there. Yet, we may be a
two planet species, after all. Elon Musk wants that second
planet to be Mars, not the Moon, but Artemis posits
the Moon as a launchpad for Mars exploration. Two, We're
going back to the Moon, and this is why the
Moon's a treasure trove of science. It holds opportunities for
(35:45):
us to make discoveries about our own planet, about our
son and Bow Solar system. The wealth of knowledge to
be gleaned from the Moon will inspire a new generation
of thought and action. Without fail, every major program and
mission NASA has invested in has led to technologies and
capabilities that have shaped our culture. The breakthroughs of the
(36:07):
Artemis era will define our generation. The Moon also makes
an interesting proving ground for streets on Earth. The new
rovers are electrified. It's the first ones were, but that
line of electric vehicle development stopped with Apollo. Hopefully what
the Artemist team finds out about batteries and motors can
be applied down here. I think that having the lunar
(36:28):
surface or the lunar environment as a proving ground is
certainly a wonderful opportunity. The solutions that are effective in
that challenging environment will absolutely push our knowledge in our
technology in the direction that we could then therefore apply
back on Earth. You have a pretty unique thermal environment there.
(36:48):
All you ev owners out there know what I'm getting at.
When it's called out, you'll lose driving range, lots of it. Yeah.
So there's a huge shift in temperature the lunar surface.
It's when it's daylight is two hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit.
When and it's the equivalent of nighttime it's two or
(37:12):
fifty degrees fahrenheit below zero. So that's a massive shift
we don't really experience anything quite like that here, and
the lunar night lasts for the equivalent of fourteen Earth days,
so it's a very long night, a very long day,
very cold night, very hot day. One of the things
that we're working on is obviously solar charging. That's going
(37:35):
to be the life source for his vehicle. There's nothing
to plug into up there, and we're developing what what's
called a solar array, and this will pull energy from
the sun and it will store it, and our goal
is to survive the lunar night. We're intending for these
vehicles to be able to live on the lunar surface,
so they have to absorb fourteen days of heat and
(37:57):
light and then use that to survive fourteen days of
cold and darkness, and then repeat over and over and
over and over again. So this rover would be of
unlimited use. You could go as far as you want
because it's rechargeable. It's also recyclable. The idea is that
(38:20):
these are not one time use, disposable mobility vehicles. These
have to have a lot of durability and longevity. We've
thought a lot about you know, we're in a situation
now where we're having conversations about repair, long term repair,
parts inventory. It's not a one use case situation like Apollo.
(38:43):
We've even talked to the team about the interchangeability of
the parts. The intent is to have more than one
of these rovers on the surface at any given time.
I mean, we're thinking about maintaining a fleet of vehicles
over a long period of time, and the more we
can share between this fleet of rovers, the better we're
going to be. Yeah, it's funny because you know the
(39:04):
Apower programs, we're sort of use it, leave it, and
then the Space Shuttle is a reusable service craft. And
now you look at what Euan Musk is doing, and
those vehicles intercept the space station and they come back
and they land on the pad, and sustainability and reusability
(39:26):
seem to be, all of a sudden the keywords of
the space program. So it's really cool to hear that
we're not just using it and dumping it on the
movie because there's three cars there already, right, I can't
wait for the photo of the new Rover and the
old Rover. That's a great idea. Do you hear that? Everybody?
(39:52):
We're going back to the moon show is written and
hosted by me Eddie Alterman. It's produced by Sam Dingman,
(40:14):
Jacob Smith, and Amy Gaines. Our editor is Jen Guera.
Original music and mastering by Ben Taliday. Our executive producer
is Mia Loebell. Our show art was designed by Sean
Karney and airbrushed by Greg Lafever. Our patron saints are
le Tom Allad and Justine Lane. Car Show is a
(40:34):
production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and
others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin
Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and
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Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions. Define more Pushkin Podcasts.
(40:56):
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to podcasts.
Pushkin. Hey Eddie here, before we get started, I wanted
you to know that you can listen to Car Show
ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. You'll also
get access to detours, bonus episodes of Car Show, where
we go for extended drives, play outtakes, and more fine
(00:37):
Pushkin Plus on the Car Show page, in Apple Podcasts,
or at pushkin dot Fm. What the hell were they
doing with a car on the goddamn moon? You're on
the Moon already. Isn't that far enough? There is no
(01:01):
more male idea in the history of the universe than
why don't we fly up to the Moon and drive around? Well, exactly, Jerry,
why shouldn't we drive around on the moon. By sending
those lunar rovers into space, NASA made it clear getting
to the Moon wasn't far enough. Once up there, we
(01:21):
had to keep going. There are three lunar rovers, three
American cars up there on the Moon right now. They
were disgorged from the bellies of Apollo fifteen, sixteen and
seventeen's lunar modules, and we left them at Hadley, Apennine,
the Descartes Highlands and Taurus lit Row, respectively. In the
(01:44):
nineteen seventies, because we were litter bugs back then, also
because getting them down would have been almost as impossible
as getting them up there in the first place. The
rovers purpose was to explore the surface of the Moon
and collect geological samples. NASA wanted to see how the
Moon was formed. The Rovers were like, yeah, getting to
(02:05):
the Moon is cool and all, but here, hold my beer.
Lunar exploration is an idea that hasn't really left us,
even though we stopped going to the Moon fifty years ago,
but NASA plans to go back by the year twenty
twenty five as part of a project called Artemis. It's
also on many billionaires to do lists like Ancient Rome.
(02:28):
Our biggest ideas are now funded by ultra rich shopkeepers
and stupid looking cowboy hats. Two one honestly human and
amazing what we just saw for the team at Blue
Origin and Jeff Bezos takes the first ride, so I
(02:50):
think it's pretty exciting. I think it opens up or
funded by his arch nemesis, evil genius spacebro Musk. You
got a contract with the Defense Department to do a
lunar lander if rom NASA from NASA, which is being
disputed by Jeff Bezos. How do you feel about that?
I think he should put more of his energy into
(03:12):
getting to orbit. You cannot seat the moon. Okay, do
you know how good your lawyers are? Yeah, boys will
be boys. Meanwhile, NASA did it already and left proof
up there in those three lonely rovers. The lunar rovers
(03:33):
were compact miracles of research and engineering, imagination and blind faith.
They were perilous things animated by the spirit of ceaseless exploration.
They were exploration vehicles squared. They were the Moonshots Moonshot.
(03:54):
I'm Eddie Alterman, and this is Car Show, my podcast
about how cars reflect who we are. The lunar rovers
count as cars definitely. They had four wheels, bidirectional steering,
and lots of communications puipment. They were battery powered, making them,
in a manner of speaking, the first ev off rods. Moreover,
(04:17):
as we'll see in this episode, the winning rover design
made it through the approvals process because it was so familiar,
so carlike. It was a concrete and reassuring connection to
what was already known, and when you're dealing with the
many unknowns of a moon mission, a little familiarity is comforting.
(04:37):
But beyond all that, there is this. If cars are
about exploration, freedom and travel, then the Lunar rovers might
be the carrious cars in the history of mankind. We
(05:08):
loved to drive our subjects here on the show, but
from time to time will encounter vehicles where a drive
is out of the budget. So we'll do the next
best thing. We'll talk with people close to the Rover project,
people like Earl Swift, who wrote Across the Airless Wilds,
which is, in my humble opinion, the definitive book on
the Lunar rovers. Thank you so much for having me. Swifts.
(05:31):
Across the Airless Wilds chronicles the unlikely origins of the
Lunar Rover project, which was first streamed up by Werner
von Braun. Von Braun was born into aristocracy. His father
was part of the Weimar Republic. As a teenager, von
Braun became obsessed with rockets, and the German government took notice.
(05:51):
They paid for him to further his studies. Von Braun,
a card carrying member of the SS, would go on
to develop advanced weapons systems for the Nazis. America covertly
patriated him after World War Two as part of Project
paper Clip. In the States, he worked on rocket development,
and he would eventually become director of the Marshall Space
(06:12):
Flight Center in Alabama. There he developed a Saturn V
rocket that got us to the Moon, but not before
guest starring in promotional films about space flight for Disneyland.
The training methods for future space flight and the special
equipment needed for survival are much like those of present
high altitude flying, and the experiments we are making today
(06:35):
are helping us to solve the more complex problems to come.
Take the present days. Von Bronze in the running with
movie star codemaker and inventor Hetty Lamar for Craziest resume
of the twentieth century. In the early fifties, he participated
in a series of stories in Collier's magazine. The series
(06:58):
explored the inevitability of the American entry into space. In
the Collier series, von Braun laid out his vision for
how we would get around on the Moon's surface. How
wild is it that the idea of lunar mobility should
spring from von Bron's mind and onto the pages of
a magazine, and a general interest magazine at that, not
(07:19):
popular science, not even popular mechanics Collier's Weekly. That's akin
to laying out a vision for nuclear fission in a
special section of people. Vron Brown was speculating about a
visit to a place that people a lot more learned
about the celestial bodies. They knew way more than he did,
(07:40):
but that didn't stop him from dreaming. Dominating von Braun's
vision were, as Swift calls them, these hulking, multitn caterpillar
tractor sized moon cars. Von Braun imagined them traveling hundreds
of miles across the lunar surface, carrying small squadrons of
astronauts on exploratory missions. Of course, that's not how it
(08:03):
ended up. There were several rover ideas floating around NASSA
at that time, and they all contributed to what ultimately
wound up tucked into the bellies of those three lunar modules.
In fact, NASA's manned spacecraft vision for lunar exploration stayed
true to that early vision. The first lunar rovers were
(08:23):
expected to be pressurized and capable of traveling long distances,
and we're going to kind of double as shelter as
well as transportation. The astronauts wouldn't live in a lunar module.
They'd get out of the module, step into this big
lunar rover and they drive around and live in that
thing for a couple of weeks and then fly home. Meanwhile,
(08:44):
and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, another crew of
engineers was working on a different vision for a mission
to the Moon, and there you see a much more
simplified concept of of what a rover would look like.
Of course, they were they had to be simplified. They
were very small, they were they were robotic, and they
were going to land on unmanned probes and then explore
(09:05):
the lunar's surface for good places for manned language to occur.
Both of those concepts you see one group of engineers
at General Motors. It's kind kind of working both concepts
at the same time. What we wound up with was
sort of a mashup of the enclosed Vombrounian idea of
(09:26):
what the lunar rover would look like and the pared
down Jet Propulsion Labs concept more like a beach buggy. Interestingly,
although we think of the Moon as an extension of
American manifest destiny, the guys leading the development of the
lunar rover weren't born here. Von Braun, as we mentioned,
was German, and while von Braun was working for NASA,
(09:49):
two Europeans working for General Motors were also key to
the rover story. They were there at the beginning working
on everything from rough rover prototypes to the final vehicles
still sitting on the moon. The two engineers at General
Motors who had the single prints all over this project
from the beginning guide named Qui Becker from Poland and
(10:11):
his right hand man parents Frank Pablix, who was from Hungary.
They came over in Becker's case right after the war,
and Pablix's case in the mid nineteen sixties after the
unsuccessful Hungarian uprising, and became Americans and became the guiding
(10:34):
spirits of the whole project. Becker and Pavlicks were not
plugging away in the frozen hinterlands of Detroit, though. These
guys got the plumb assignment go to California and dream
stuff up. Santa Barbara was home to GM's defense research labs,
which focused on winning military business. This tells you something
(10:57):
important about General Motors at that time. They were so omnipotent,
so vital to and in meshed with our country's success
that they had their own experimental department full of these
austral hung Arean engineers who were there to theorize about
blowing things up. They weren't there to get their hands
dirty and actually produce something. Another division would handle that.
(11:22):
But when push came to shove, they did produce something.
The idea that we went from imagining the basic notion
of how to get to the Moon in nineteen sixty
two to driving around on it just nine years later.
That's nuts. It takes me nine years just to clean
my basement. The first thing Becker did was trying to
(11:43):
work out the soil composition on the Moon, not the terrain,
but the lurine. You know, if you've ever done munting
in a jeep, or you've raced motocross or just ridden
a mountain bike, you owe something of the experience to
Greg Becker because he invented the branch of engineering that
studies the relationship of vehicles to the soils over which
(12:04):
they travel. So that takes some tread design vehicle weight
versus type of ground uron Every factor that comes into
plays to whether you can gain traction and go somewhere
off road goes back to Greg Becker. Thus was born
the science of terra mechanics, the study of wheeled or
track vehicles across terrain. But Becker wasn't designing a vehicle
(12:27):
for just any dirt. It's hard to get more off
road than the Moon. How did Greg Becker know what
was up there? Well, that's that is. Of course, no
one knew what was up there. The only thing that
was known about the Moon's surface was what could be
seen through telescopes, and given the telescopes of the day,
(12:48):
that wasn't a lot. But they made a number of assumptions.
Number one thing, you know, there wasn't believed to be
any water on the Moon. Therefore you're dealing with a dry,
granular soil. And wasn't there a fear that the surface
was so soft, like a talc softness, that anything would
sort of sink into it. Well, there was a There
(13:11):
was a scientist named Thomas Gold who was really his
comments on it were taking out of context. He in
a nineteen fifty five or fifty six paper, had postulated
that what we saw as seas on the lunar's surface
were actually settled dust in places that could be thousands
(13:32):
of feet thick, and really was reporters of the day
who then kind of took that in extrapolated from it
this notion that if a spacecraft came down on the
lunar surface, it might finish out of side, it might
sink into this dry lunar quicksand never to be seen again.
But Becker and Pavlix were undeterred. They experimented with all
(13:55):
sorts of prototypes, and it was Becker's belief that by
grinding up volcanic rock and similar materials he could fake it,
and so he and Pablix did just that. They used
a number of substitutes, these flour white flour, and wound
open a bit of a rat problem in Santa Barbara
because of that. But Pavlex and Becker came up with
(14:18):
one design for a rober bit was composed of screws
basically that would just burrow through a really soft, light,
fluffy surface. But it became clear that over a couple
of years of experimentation that the mode of travel that
made the most sense when you looked at complexity and
weight versus what you were likely to find on the
(14:40):
learner's surface was the wheel, the rover's wheel. It's engineering
and materials would be key to this whole project and
would ultimately land Boeing in GM the final NASA contract.
That wheel would take time to work out using the
new science of Tera mechanics, but the number of wheels
(15:02):
that was something Becker and Pablox thought they knew from
the start. The earliest GM proposals by Becker and Ablets
were six wheels, all wheel drive, which they found was
the perfect setup to get over practically anything. Wasn't there
a variety of articulation types of the body, Well, it
(15:22):
absolutely essential to the six wheel prototype that they developed
was the fact that it had a completely flexible frame.
You know, if it came to a block ahead, it
could climb it first with the front wheels kind of
you know, pulling their way up as the back two
sets pushed. And then once the front wheels got to
the top of the obstacle, you'd have the front wheels
(15:45):
pulling while the back wheels pushed and the middle wheels
clawed their way up. And then finally you'd have two
sets of wheels up front pulling while that last set
of wheels went over. So why did they go to
four wheels. They went to four wheels because they didn't
have a choice. They were still pushing a six wheeled
rover as late as nineteen the fall of nineteen sixty seven,
(16:06):
at which point NASA's budget was slap and the agency
basically threw up at sands and said, we're not going
to be able to afford to the cinder or rover
to the Moon. Becker and Pavlik's original rover concepts relied
on two rockets to reach the surface of the Moon,
one carrying astronauts and another carrying the hulking six wheeled rover.
(16:29):
And with the budget cut that flew out the window.
No Apollo mission was going to get two rockets. But
at this point they've been They spent seventy eight years
working on this NonStop, and they weren't content to let
all that work go to waste. They would need to
find some space in the tiny lunar module itself, and
Becker and Pavox weren't the only engineers whose work was
(16:50):
upended by the budget cuts. As they began working frantically
to downsize the original rover design. Three other companies Vibe
to deliver the winning design to Werner von Braun at NASA.
The three were Chrysler, Grummin and Fendix. Bendix came up
with a minimum number of moving parts approach. Forget sophistication,
(17:12):
forget elegance. We just don't want anything to go wrong,
so we're going to cut anything that can. Bendix put
the bulk of their energy into the all important wheels.
They devised a spoked aluminum hub with titanium hoops at
its crown, surrounded by a titanium band. The idea was
that if the Bendix rover hid an obstacle, the titanium
(17:35):
hoops would compress, observing the shock of the impact. Then
once the rover was past the obstacle, the titanium would
pop back into shape. Wheel and suspension in one wasn't
good looking. It looked like it had been fashioned in
an old West blacksmith shop, but it worked pretty well. Meanwhile,
(17:55):
over at Chrysler, the design team there was working on
a rover with a much smaller footprint. The two astronauts
would sit back to back on a much narrower platform,
but there was a cost to the Chrysler's slim profile
didn't leave much cargo space for collecting lunar rock samples
and collecting samples was the whole point of the rover.
(18:16):
And finally there was the team over at Grumman working
up their own idea for the rover, a crouching spidery looking.
It really looked like a spacecraft on wheels. Grumman's design
had wheel shaped like flower pots turned on their sides.
They compressed over the Lorraine. They were sort of comically floppy. Also,
(18:37):
the Grumman design didn't have traditional steering, just a joystick
at the front. When an astronaut moved the joystick, the
entire craft would contort itself and pivot, and it was fast.
It's crouching attitude gave it almost the sports per field.
But in the end Werner von Braunze said no to
all three. Grumman's space spider was just too weird for NASA.
(19:06):
The Chrysler didn't have enough cargo capacity to elect geological samples,
and Bendix's design seemed rudimentary. And then, in the spring
of nineteen sixty eight, just four months after the budget cuts,
who should walk into von Braun's office our Man Fern's
pavlis carrying a one six scale model of an ingeniously
(19:27):
redesigned GM rover. Pavlis proposed a four wheeled rover that
can fold into thirds, like how you'd fold a letter
to fit in an envelope. The reduction in the number
of wheels plus the associated origami meant that this rover
could be stowed in the lunar module. NASA wouldn't need
two rockets after all, the seats folded flat and both
(19:51):
axles folded back over the center section. And while Pavlicks
had to pare down his wheel count from six to four,
the wheels themselves were a feat of Terra mechanical genius
mesh donuts woven from stainless steel piano wire reinforced with
titanium hoops inside and compile at Chevron's for traction laid
over the wire, eight hundred threads of it woven into
(20:15):
a tight mesh. Each space between the threads was about
three sixteenth of an inch wide. That was the outer balloon,
the tire, if you will, of the wheel mounted onto
a spun aluminum hub, and then inside you had a
treis of titanium hoops that served as a bump stop.
So if you hit something really hard and you deformed
(20:36):
that outside mesh tire and the titanium hoop would keep
the deformity from going into deeper Legend has it when
von Braun saw Pablock's redesign, he slammed his fist on
the desktop and shouted, V must do this. There are
many brilliant elements of Pablock's vision, but perhaps most crucial
was that his GM rover felt familiar somehow. It wasn't
(21:00):
a spartan medieval hauler or a futuristic spider. It was,
in essence a car. It followed the precepts of, you know,
an American Earth car GM product of the late nineteen
sixty The power plant, mainly two thirty six bolt batteries,
was up front, the astronauts sat side by side of midships,
(21:23):
and then the trunk was in the back. It was
really the first ev that General motors produced correct at
least yes since the very early twentieth century. Has originally
proposed it was going to be rechargeable. You'd be able
to put up a solar array and recharge the thing
in NASA killed that as an unnecessary complication. Von Braun
(21:46):
spent the next year navigating NASA's bureaucracy and Production of
Pavlick's Rover began in the fall of nineteen sixty nine.
GM partner with Boeing for the build, and NASA gave
them a due date of March nineteen seventy one, a
little less than a year and a half. NASA usually
took three or four years to develop a piece of hardware.
(22:06):
This was crazily fast, and the breakneck production calendar wasn't
the only complication, you know, it's it's funny. In the book,
one of my favorite passages is the frustration that NASA
is having with Boeing and General Motors, sort of in
that order. NASA is working to this crazy set of
(22:31):
standards where absolutely nothing can go wrong. And it was
you know, everything was on the science, you know, everything
was instrumented flight. But General motors they're making sixty nine
Vista cruisers. They're making Camaros. In fairness to General Motors.
Now fair in mind, this has nothing to do with
(22:52):
Camber motors in Detroit. So these are not the same
people that are building the Vega think you know, the
Santa Barbara operation. This was an idea factory. These guys
were never planning to actually build any of the stuff.
They came up with. So what you have here a
bunch of serrists, fantastic engineers, great at building prototypes, but
(23:12):
not at all schools and actually building a production vehicle.
And suddenly they're thrust into a situation where not only
do they have to build the most carefully constructed vehicle
in human history, but they have to do it in
seventeen months. All they have is kind of a bag design.
(23:35):
When they go into it, they know nothing about. NASA's
weregorous testing procedures, which take months and are just numbingly repetitive,
you know. They were unfamiliar with a culture in which
if a piece broke you had to write reports in
triplicate detailing every test that you then put that broken
piece to to find out why it had broken. And
(23:56):
so it was a clash of cultures to bureaucratic obstacles, however,
pale next to the scientific challenges. There was no way
to simulate actually drive in accurately anyway. In one subscriber,
equipment from the previous Apollo missions had been tested in
space before liftoff. The lunar module and the command module
had been flown into low Earth orbit as sort of
(24:18):
dry runs, but there was simply no way to test
the rover in the environment for which it was intended.
For one thing, putting earthweight astronauts in a one sex
or moon mass rover would destroy the thing. They could
test the wheels out in the sands of California, but
not the rover itself. There was no way to predict
(24:40):
exactly how it would behave in those conditions. Yeah, a
lot of it was pure mass and good engineering, really
pretty visionary stuff. We're so jaded to the conveniences of
twenty first century life. We're talking Stone Age stuff here.
When we talked about Apollo, you know, stuff that was
worked out on blackboards and was five rules. We'll hear
(25:04):
how it all worked out after the break. As much
of a success story as the rover eventually became, some
stuff did go wrong. On a Pole fifteen, the first
(25:26):
lunar rover mission, astronaut Dave Scott climbed into the driver's
seat shortly after touchdown on the Moon, only to discover
that the front steering wasn't working. Thankfully, it was just
a brief electrical glitch, but steering issues cropped up again
on a Polo sixteen and then later in that second
rover mission, things got really gnarly. John Young, the mission commander,
(25:51):
as he was walking past the erber, snagged beat the
right wear fender extension with a hammer that was jutting
out of a pocket on her shin and ripped it off.
Without that fender extension, the werber picked up a rooster
tail of dust wherever it went, and you did not
need high speeds to achieve that rooster tail. I mean,
(26:11):
these guys were going six miles an hour most of
the time. They topped out at like eight, and that
was an uncomfortably fast drive. But the result was that
this dust got propelled onto the astronauts, onto the electronics.
A cloud of fine moon dust might not sound like
a big deal, but it's highly abrasive. Scientists have described
(26:32):
it as fine as flour and rough as sandpaper that
gets into any moving part and you're screwed over two
hundred thousand miles from home. On top of all of that,
if that dust got into the rover's electrical system, it
would absorb the blazing heat from the sun and fry
the circuits and so working overnight. John Young put together
(26:54):
a solution, and they picked the fender with maps duct
tape and two clamps, good old duct tape. Can you
imagine how cool headed these guys are? Well, yeah, I
mean you kind of understand Nassis requirement that they all
be test pilots. You go, you fall quarter million miles there,
and you get into a car, You get into a
(27:15):
nineteen sixty nine General Motors product. And I don't know, lady,
if you've owned any nineteen sixty nine General Motors products,
but I've owned two of it. I had two Oldsmobiles,
just a Cruiser in a cutless convertible, and I loved
both of those cars. But you would advasked me, you know,
would you be willing to get behind the wheel of
that cutless convertible a quarter million miles from home and
(27:38):
drive out of sight of your one way home. I
might have to think about that. Those nineteen sixty nine
General Motors projects took us past the known known, allowing
us to make good on the promise of Apolo eleven,
Because why go up there if we're not going to
see what the moon is all about, if it's habitable,
(28:00):
if it's volcanic, if there's water. Apollo eleven, in case
you're having a hard time keeping your mission strait is
the famous Neil Armstrong Buzz Aldrin voyage. One small step
for a man, one giant leap for mankind. But in
some ways the lunar rover missions were even greater leaps.
(28:23):
Armstrong and Aldron's mandate was relatively simple. Land on the
most boring piece of real estate on the Moon, the
Sea of Tranquility, totally flat, no obstacles, walk around for
a couple hours, get back in the ship, meet up
with the orbiter, and fly home. Easy. But the farthest
(28:44):
Armstrong and Aldrin got from the lunar module was sixty
five yards. And here's maybe the key point about the rovers.
Every mission before the lunar rovers was a prelude to
the real science, the real interrogation of the Moon's surface.
Apollos eleven through fourteen were really just equipment testing. The
(29:05):
guys from a polar fourteen, you know, the walking only
as far as they can walk in their spacesuits, and
just simple movement in that spacesuit was taxing as you
used muscle just to shuffle forward or the bunny hop.
Your metabolic radius increasing, which increases your consumption of the
(29:26):
air in cooling water, your backpack which limits the amount
of time you can stay outside. The radius of a
Polo war team was about half a mile. You were
really limited in radius. On the next mission, Apollo fifteen,
the crew of Dave Scott and Jim Irwin covers seventeen
and a quarter miles in their GM rover. It just
completely remade the mission. When Dave Scott and Jim Irwin
(29:49):
got into that rover, they covered more in their first
thirteen minutes in the car than all of the previous
missions had covered on the liner surface. From Bile, those
guys climbed the side of a mountain the sides of Kilimanjaro,
went hundreds of feet up up the side of it.
They explored the edge of a canyon that was a
mile wide and thousand feet deep with the PUBLICI team.
(30:11):
For the first time, you have a mission that doesn't
have except for testing the rover on that first drive,
doesn't have a developmental angle to it. It's pure science
and exploration. They explored all right. With the GM rovers.
Our astronauts went farther and brought back more stuff than
(30:32):
ever could have happened otherwise. They went a total of
fifty six miles on the three emissions. It was a
total game changer, and what they brought back in their
rock bags was key to finding out how the Moon's
surface developed. Scott and Irwin discovered what's known as the
Genesis rock. Genesis rock was a piece of a north
(30:53):
of site, which is a mineral that was thought to
be part of the original lunar crust. You know, one
of the things that it's valuable about the Moon from
a scientific standpoint is that it's been dead since infancy.
So while you know, the Earth is this very dynamic
place with with changes wrought by oceans and by volcanoes
(31:16):
and by uh, you know, continental drift, the Moon's is
as it as it was, you know, four and a
half billion years ago, largely the only changes that have
come to it have been brought by meteorite striking it.
So it makes it really valuable if you're looking at
the origins of the universe to go there to get
(31:37):
a beat on on how things work. Yeah, yeah, in
its way, and it's dead, terrible desolate way. And you know,
the North Site, because it was part of the thought
to be part of the original lunar crust, was was
something that NASA really put a priority on. It was
a holy grail, and Dave Scott and Jimmer, when founded
(31:59):
on their second drive and were well trained enough as geologists,
they recognized immediately what it was that they were holding
in their hands. The bright white Genesis Rock was thought
to be ejected from the crust after a meteorite hit
the Moon's surface. The Genesis rock showed that the Moon's
later topography was shaped by stuff hitting it, but that
(32:21):
the moon was also very early on volcanic. Not bad
for a day's work. Why did it stop? Apollo? Money?
In a word, money, I mean, you have to remember this,
This is all occurring while we're mired in Vietnam. We
(32:48):
are dealing with just terrible societal problems at home, none
of which seemed easy to fix except by spending an
awful lot of money and a polishifting costs. Four hundred
and forty five million dollars. Four hundred forty five million
(33:08):
bucks is a lot of money anytime, but this was
nineteen seventy one. That's over three billion dollars in today's money.
And that was just the Apollo fifteen price tag. The
Apolopo Ram, for all of its achievements, had one really
serious drawback, and that was that virtually all of the
equipment used to reach those achievements was used once and
(33:31):
thrown away. The Lunar rover made a remarkable journey from
the pages of Colliers Weekly in the early fifties to
the surface of the Moon in nineteen seventy one, and
then just like that, the mission was over. We left
the Moon, and we left our rovers behind, literally and figuratively.
(33:56):
Who knows what might have happened if the project continued.
How much further along in the development of electric vehicles
would we be and would there be all inclusive resorts
up there on that Descartes highlands. Look up the Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter camera from Arizona State University and you can
zoom in on the landing sites. You can see the
(34:17):
tire tracks, and you can follow over the tire tracks
for miles across the Learner surface. We'll soon go back
up there to create more tire tracks and hopefully discover
more than we were able to the first round. NASA's
(34:40):
Artemis program plans to get us back to the Moon
for the first time in fifty years. The current timetable
has Americans landing on the Moon in twenty twenty four,
NASA plans to put a permanent colony on the Moon
and use it as a platform for travel to Mars
and once again, General motors is busy at the drafting table,
(35:00):
But unlike those early Apollo missions, the goal this time
around isn't just about exploration. What's really interesting about this
particular series of missions is that the intent is a
long term habitation, or a colonization of the Moon, if
you will. That's Jeffrey Neil who's working to design the
new lunar rover for Artemis. So yes, perhaps we'll get
(35:21):
our vacation homes up there. Yet, we may be a
two planet species, after all. Elon Musk wants that second
planet to be Mars, not the Moon, but Artemis posits
the Moon as a launchpad for Mars exploration. Two, We're
going back to the Moon, and this is why the
Moon's a treasure trove of science. It holds opportunities for
(35:45):
us to make discoveries about our own planet, about our
son and Bow Solar system. The wealth of knowledge to
be gleaned from the Moon will inspire a new generation
of thought and action. Without fail, every major program and
mission NASA has invested in has led to technologies and
capabilities that have shaped our culture. The breakthroughs of the
(36:07):
Artemis era will define our generation. The Moon also makes
an interesting proving ground for streets on Earth. The new
rovers are electrified. It's the first ones were, but that
line of electric vehicle development stopped with Apollo. Hopefully what
the Artemist team finds out about batteries and motors can
be applied down here. I think that having the lunar
(36:28):
surface or the lunar environment as a proving ground is
certainly a wonderful opportunity. The solutions that are effective in
that challenging environment will absolutely push our knowledge in our
technology in the direction that we could then therefore apply
back on Earth. You have a pretty unique thermal environment there.
(36:48):
All you ev owners out there know what I'm getting at.
When it's called out, you'll lose driving range, lots of it. Yeah.
So there's a huge shift in temperature the lunar surface.
It's when it's daylight is two hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit.
When and it's the equivalent of nighttime it's two or
(37:12):
fifty degrees fahrenheit below zero. So that's a massive shift
we don't really experience anything quite like that here, and
the lunar night lasts for the equivalent of fourteen Earth days,
so it's a very long night, a very long day,
very cold night, very hot day. One of the things
that we're working on is obviously solar charging. That's going
(37:35):
to be the life source for his vehicle. There's nothing
to plug into up there, and we're developing what what's
called a solar array, and this will pull energy from
the sun and it will store it, and our goal
is to survive the lunar night. We're intending for these
vehicles to be able to live on the lunar surface,
so they have to absorb fourteen days of heat and
(37:57):
light and then use that to survive fourteen days of
cold and darkness, and then repeat over and over and
over and over again. So this rover would be of
unlimited use. You could go as far as you want
because it's rechargeable. It's also recyclable. The idea is that
(38:20):
these are not one time use, disposable mobility vehicles. These
have to have a lot of durability and longevity. We've
thought a lot about you know, we're in a situation
now where we're having conversations about repair, long term repair,
parts inventory. It's not a one use case situation like Apollo.
(38:43):
We've even talked to the team about the interchangeability of
the parts. The intent is to have more than one
of these rovers on the surface at any given time.
I mean, we're thinking about maintaining a fleet of vehicles
over a long period of time, and the more we
can share between this fleet of rovers, the better we're
going to be. Yeah, it's funny because you know the
(39:04):
Apower programs, we're sort of use it, leave it, and
then the Space Shuttle is a reusable service craft. And
now you look at what Euan Musk is doing, and
those vehicles intercept the space station and they come back
and they land on the pad, and sustainability and reusability
(39:26):
seem to be, all of a sudden the keywords of
the space program. So it's really cool to hear that
we're not just using it and dumping it on the
movie because there's three cars there already, right, I can't
wait for the photo of the new Rover and the
old Rover. That's a great idea. Do you hear that? Everybody?
(39:52):
We're going back to the moon show is written and
hosted by me Eddie Alterman. It's produced by Sam Dingman,
(40:14):
Jacob Smith, and Amy Gaines. Our editor is Jen Guera.
Original music and mastering by Ben Taliday. Our executive producer
is Mia Loebell. Our show art was designed by Sean
Karney and airbrushed by Greg Lafever. Our patron saints are
le Tom Allad and Justine Lane. Car Show is a
(40:34):
production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and
others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin
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