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