![]() ![]() ![]() Yet in 1969, 50 years after Boeing won fame by delivering the first international airmail between Vancouver B.C. Boeing (1881-1956) was an early aviation visionary, but when he formed his first airplane company in 1916 he could hardly have imagined that one day astronauts would be scooting around the lunar surface in a strange, dune-buggy-like device with his name on it. On July 30, 1971, Scott and Irwin will become the first humans to traverse the lunar surface on wheels, gleefully kicking up clouds of moon dust as they range far from their landing site. Irwin (1930-1991), and folded away in a compartment on the side of the lunar lander is Boeing's Lunar Roving Vehicle. Despite running massively over budget, the first fully operational lunar dune buggy, Rover 1, is ready to fly to the moon when the Apollo 15 mission blasts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a Saturn V rocket on the morning of July 26, 1971. The company does so in the remarkably short span of 17 months. Science-fiction writers and far-sighted scientists and engineers have been speculating about what such a vehicle would look like since early in the twentieth century, but it will fall to Boeing to move the concept from speculation to reality. The judgments and opinions of CNET's staff are our own and we do not accept paid editorial content.On October 28, 1969, barely three months after Apollo 11 carried the first astronauts to land on the moon, The Boeing Company wins a $19.6 million contract to design and build a motorized "moon buggy" that will give future astronauts far greater mobility on the lunar surface. Moon drifting? You saw it here first.Įditors' note: Travel costs related to this story were covered by the manufacturer, which is common in the auto industry. So, a bit of an ignominious end to my virtual lunar expedition, but I was gratified to see that I left tire tracks on the lunar surface. As it turns out, that speed was more than enough to launch me over the lip of a crater and into a tumbling doom that immediately crashed the simulator. The speed in the simulator is limited to about 12 mph - hardly breakneck, but it is 50% faster than the old rover. ![]() The simulator did not replicate the clouds of lunar dust I was surely kicking up, but that definitely wouldn't have helped my coefficient of friction. A little like being on ice, the car doesn't tend to respond immediately thanks to any over-aggressive driving sending it bounding into the air. No issues there, but it certainly did take me a few moments to get used to the delayed reactions on the moon. The simulator control room in which engineers tell you exactly where you went wrong with all your decisions. These can be customized to offer any of a number of driving experiences, from droning down the highway to screaming around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It covers thousands of acres and offers hundreds of miles of test tracks but, crucial for this enterprise, also houses a number of massive driving simulators. General Motors' sprawling Milford Proving Ground sits about 45 minutes northwest of Detroit. Well, I drove a simulated version of the thing. This one's called the Lunar Mobility Vehicle, developed in partnership with Lockheed Martin, and I was recently lucky enough to drive it. and GM is once again building that buggy. That vehicle, developed in the 1960s by General Motors and deployed on three separate Apollo missions in the early '70s, was formally called the Lunar Roving Vehicle.įifty years on, NASA's Artemis program is a new way to get humans back on the moon as soon as 2025. While there are plenty of reasons for being jealous of astronauts - things like free trips to space and all the freeze-dried ice cream you can eat - I'm never more envious of our brave rocket-riding explorers than when watching footage of them hooning around on the moon buggy. ![]()
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