Good things, they say, come in small packages.
Of course, small can be relative. If you found a four foot by four foot by four foot box waiting for you under the tree one Christmas morning, "small" probably wouldn't be the word you would use to describe it.
But if you were told that same box contained a vehicle you could use to explore places no one had ever been, it might seem surprisingly small. Certainly, it wouldn't begin to hold one of Christopher Columbus' sailing vessels or even Jacques Cousteau's yellow submarine. You could probably shove Lewis and Clark in the box, but you couldn't include much gear.
That amount of space, though, was adequate to transform exploration of the moon during the Apollo program. The descent stage of the Apollo Lunar Module had a free area that large, and engineers worked to design a vehicle for surface exploration that could fit inside it. The result was the Lunar Roving Vehicle, also informally known as the moon buggy -- the car-like rover that was used on the last three moon landings to allow astronauts to cover more ground more quickly during their exploration.
In order to fit inside the space, the lunar rover was designed to fold up tightly into the small cube, and was lightweight enough that in the lower gravity of the moon, the astronauts could remove it from its storage area and fold it back out so they could ride it. The rover first drove on the moon 41 years ago this week, on the Apollo 15 mission, and was used again on Apollo 16 and 17 in 1972. The Apollo 17 rover allowed astronauts to travel almost five miles from their lander during one excursion -- a distance it took the robotic Mars rover Spirit five years to traverse.
Today, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., uses the challenge of designing the Lunar Roving Vehicle to inspire high school and college students to test their own engineering prowess. The center sponsors the annual Great Moonbuggy Race, in which students design, build and race pedal-powered vehicles based on the original lunar rover. Like the LRV, the moonbuggies must be able to carry two people and ride over craters, and they have to be able to fold up to fit in a four-by-four-by-four space.
Each year, the race is held at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, where an obstacle course is laid out featuring simulated lunar terrain, incuding small craters and hills. Each team chooses one male and one female student to pedal the buggy through the course, aiming to get the best speed while avoiding hitting the course barriers.
Someday, students who participated in the Great Moonbuggy Race may design the next vehicle to drive on the moon, but, in the meantime, the museum's Davidson Center has given its participants a high honor by displaying a sample moonbuggy next to the vehicle that inspired it, the Lunar Roving Vehicle.
Because whether it's an actual moon rover or a student-built moonbuggy, it takes some pretty impressive engineering to fit that much greatness in that small a space.
Contributing Author: David Hitt
