Putting a Car on the Moon

for coming on. I'm very excited about your show. Can you give me the like, very brief elevator pitch for Car Show? Yeah? So, Car Show is about why we drive what we drive. It's not about horsepower and milesburg Gallen, And it's not a sort of comparison test show. And it's not, you know, two guys throwing verbal wrenches at each other. It's not two guys arguing over the fence. I think it dovetails really well with what you do here.

You know, it's about the problems associated with producing something innovative, doing something new. It is that innovation that lasts, and those innovative cars are the ones that sort of fix themselves in the culture, and those are the breakthrough cars are the ones that we're going to look at both how they came to be and then what their cultural impact was. So I love the episode about the lunar rover, which is basically a car, right yeah, I mean it

looks like a jeep. You've probably if you're listening to, probably seen pictures of the guys driving on the Moon right right in their space suits and they've got the you know, the satellite dish and those wild men schwire wheels. There are two different models of the lunar rover, right, there's the first one that we built, that engineers built, like what is it now, fifty sixty years ago when

when people went to the Moon for the first time. Yea, So part one of the show is going to be you telling me that story, and then part two of the show is sort of excitingly, engineers are right now today building a new lunar rover, a new car to drive on the Moon for the next you know, for this planned new mission to the Moon. So so let's start out with the with the old lunar rover, right, like, just what just get me into that story? What are we It starts in what the fifties, the early sixties.

Must be the sixties. It's the sixties, and the timeline was very, very tight. Um. What they found was the earliest Apollo missions were really limited in scope by how far the astronauts could travel. You couldn't really terry yeah, exactly exactly. It took a lot of energy, they didn't have a lot of air, and so they couldn't really do science up there. They couldn't really interrogate the surface of the Moon. And now the idea of having a car on the Moon, it's kind of ridiculous. Right, we're

already at the moon, right, do we really need a car? Well, the funny thing is you do to do real science, you had to go past the radius of walking exploration. So we're gonna do this kind of ridiculous but apparently useful thing, build a car to go to the Moon. Like, where do you even start? Well, the first problem is how do you even test the thing? Okay, you're designing a vehicle for a one six gravity environment, but do you have Earth mass astronauts that have to sit in it?

And if they sit in it, they'll crush it, So you couldn't drive it beforehand. So they built the vehicle that was like optimized to drive on the Moon in one sixth gravity and be super light. But that means that like literally if the astronauts just sat in the driver's seat on Earth, they'd break it, that's right, they would crush it. So it's like a crapshoot. It's like,

what we hope it works. There was no test drive, so okay, so they build this thing with no test drive, and then and then you've got to get it from from Earth to the Moon, right, like a whole car. You've got to get it to the Moon to love with the astronauts. Yeah, so they originally when they wanted to send a car up, they wanted to send two lunar modules. But the budget was two lunar modules, meaning two spaceships. Two spaceships, one one for the guys and

one for the car. One for the guys and one for the car, like a garage, like a garage in space where you park your car, a flying garage to take the car, because you've got to put the car somewhere right, and it's a little space ship. But the guys are in right, so that you know you've got this lunar module that's got all this stuff. Minute, where are you gonna put a car? Yeah? So okay, so

so do they do that? And so the original design had six wheels, and they thought, okay, we can package this six wheel vehicle because that'll be great for crawling over stuff. You know, six wheels, there's always you know, some contact with the terrain, bumpy if you're up on a crazy rock something still rolling pushing against the moon. Right, there's highly articulated sort of space spider. Right, that was gonna gonna crawl over stuff and could get over anything.

A space spider. I mean, what's not to love about a highlight insulated space planet. Right, budget gets slashed, They go, we can't send two lunar modules. We can always send one. We're not going to send a garage to the moon. But we still need the car, right, okay, okay, this is a good problem. Still want to You've got this little space ship full of guys and stuff, and you've got to find a place to put a car in it. Exactly. So it's the old problem. How do you get the

stroller in your trunk? Right? You fold it up. So they did that with the with the Rover, they built a car that folds up yes. So first thing they did was they need to downsize it a little bit, so they went from six wheels to four wheels, even

more like a traditional car. Yes, And then they figured out how to fold it like a business letter, like in thirds really like it like it like or like a maybe like an accordion kind of, I mean yeah, yeah, yeah, like the one axle flop over onto the main section where they would sit. The other axle would flop on top of that, and they'd stuff it into the belly

of the of the single lunar module. So then you take it out of basically the belly of the lunar module, you unfold it, you hop in, and you start driving around and did it? Did it work? Is this what actually happened? Yes, it worked. It was right. So I know in the story there's this moment you talk about where everything's going fine, but then something goes wrong. Right. Yes, Up on the Moon they run into a problem. The

first mission that had a lunar rover was Apolo fifteen. Okay, they unfurl the thing, they roll it onto the surface of the Moon, and then the steering doesn't work. So they got a lemon. Right, So the steering doesn't work, and is that the end of that? Do they just not drive on that mission? It magically connects and they're fine. Okay, so they're driving around. It works itself out. A little electrical glitch that works itself out. Not a big deal,

but sort of a harbinger of things to come. On Apollo sixteen, Okay, the next mission, astronaut John Young has a hammer in his pocket on his space suit, as one does, and he walks past the lunar rover and the hammer snags itself on the fender of one of the rear wheels and it rips the fender off. Okay, not a huge deal on Earth, right, Sure you see people driving around with that offender exactly, but these have

sort of like motorcycle fenders. He rips this thing off, and now he's driving around on the Moon and he's kicking up a huge flume of moon dust, which is gritty, not really good for the equipment, the space suits. This gritty moon dust gets into everything, and the fender was supposed to sort of keep that dust from spraying up, right, That's what the fender is there for, And now the fender is not doing that, so there's getting everywhere. So okay,

so there's dust everywhere. What happens? Okay, so it starts getting into the electronics and things start overheating, and it's getting into the O rings on their space suits and bad, not just for the call are but for the astronauts. Oh yeah, like really bad. And so what do you do? There are no repair shops on the moon. Right, he's got a hammer. We know he's got a hammer. That he's got a hammer. And you know what else they had? They had duct tape. No, okay, yeah, they had it

with duct tape. They fixed it with duct tape. They took geologic they took the geological maps that they had in the rover, folded them together into a you know, sort of makeshift fender extension and duct tape. Ton that is dynamite. Isn't it awesome? And it worked and they just kept driving around the Moon. That's right, That's exactly right. Let me say, Eddie, thank you for coming talking to me about your new show. Thank you, and let's play now a part of your new show of car show.

NASA's planning a new mission to the Moon, and people right now are design a new car to drive on the Moon. So let's hear that NASA's 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. 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 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 too. We're going back to the Moon, and this is why the Moon is a treasure trove of science. It holds opportunities for us to make discoveries about our own planet, about our son and a bottle 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 Artemis era will define our generation. The Moon also makes an interesting proving ground for streets on Earth. The new rovers are electrified, as the first ones were, but that line of electric vehicle development stopped with Apollo. Hopefully what the Artemis team finds out about batteries and motors can be applied down here.

I think that having the lunar surface or the lunar environment as a proving ground is certainly a wonderful opportunity. The solution is 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. All you ev owners out there know what I'm getting at. When

it's cold out, you'll lose driving range, lots of it. Yeah, So there's a huge shift in temperature the lunar surface when it's when it's daylight is two hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit. When it's the equivalent of nighttime, it's it's two hundred and 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 that's they're going to be the source for this vehicle. There's nothing to plug into up there, and we're developing 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 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 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 and repair our parts inventory. It's not a one used case situation like Apollo. 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 Apollo programs were sort of use it and leave it, and then the Space

Shuttle is a reusable service craft. And now you look at what euon Musk is doing, and those vehicles intercept the space station, they come back and they land on the pad, and sustainability and reusability 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 moon because there's three cars there already. All right, I can't wait for the photo of the new Rover and the old Rovers. A

great idea. Do you hear that? Everybody, We're going back to the moon. That was a clip from Pushkin's newest podcast, Car Show exclamation Mark with Eddie Alterman. Other episodes of the show include stories about a car that defied gravity, the best sports sedan ever made, and also how the minivan changed America. It's true it did. You can find Car Show with Eddie Alterman wherever