The Incredible Engineering Behind Driving on the Moon

Long before the Apollo Program was officially announced in 1961, engineers and science fiction writers recognized the value of giving future moon explorers some kind of wheeled vehicle to increase their mobility. Most early concepts for such vehicles were large truck-like contraptions with pressurized cabins, allowing the astronauts to operate in so-called “shirt-sleeve” conditions, not unlike in the phenomenal film, The Martian. Such vehicles appear in Polish science fiction writer Jersz Zulawski’s 1901 novel On a Silvery Globe and Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s 1952 comic book On a Marché Sur La Lune AKA Explorers on the Moon, in which intrepid globetrotting journalist Tintin becomes the first person to set foot on earth’s satellite. That same year, Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket engineer who developed the V2 ballistic missile and was brought to the United States after the Second World War as part of Project Paperclip, wrote a series of articles for Collier’s Weekly magazine with the delightfully gung-ho 1950s title of Man Will Conquer Space Soon! in which he speculated on what future space missions might look like. In these articles, he described a hypothetical six-week expedition to the moon equipped with specially-designed ten-ton tractor-trailer vehicles for hauling supplies. These articles were later adapted into three episodes of the Disney anthology TV series Disneyland - Man in Space, Man and the Moon, and Mars and Beyond - in which von Braun was prominently featured. Once the Apollo Program officially got underway, von Braun - by now the director of the newly-formed Marshall Spaceflight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama - commissioned a series of studies in cooperation with various corporations including Lockheed, Bendix, Boeing, General Motors, Brown Engineering, Grumman, and Bell Aerospace to evaluate the feasibility of building a wheeled vehicle for lunar surface exploration. Directed by MSC engineer Saverio Morea, these studies came up with a number of theoretical concepts including the Lunar Logistics System or LLS; the Lunar Scientific Survey Module or LSSM; the Mobility Test Article or MTA, the Lunar-Traversing Vehicle or LTV and the Mobility Laboratory or MOLAB - all of which followed the same general form factor of a large, truck-like vehicle with a pressurized cabin and four or more large wheels driven by electric motors. At first, the primary challenge in designing such vehicles was the nature of the lunar surface, which in the late 1950s and early 1960s was largely unknown. Some astronomers speculated that millions of years of bombardment by meteorites might have buried the surface under a blanket of dust several feet deep that would instantly swallow up any lander, rover, or astronaut that touched down on it. Author: Gilles Messier Host/Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices