Beating Books: How NASA selected the first Lunar Rover to launch the moon

The idea of ​​space travel was so new to us that after President Kennedy delivered his famous speech of the moon, even NASA’s top scientists were not sure we could sit still. Some think that any work that can be done on the ground simply sinks in the moonlight like a huge, airless sand pit! In his most recent book, Universal Airless Animals: Lunar Rover and Winning Final Moon Landings, a journalist and former Fulbright colleague, Earl Swift, is reviewing the festivities of Apollo 15, 16, and 17, our final lunar missions (until the work of Artemis is completed). In the comments below, Swift takes the reader on a tour of JPL’s rigorous, step-moon-destroying experimental courses and a rover-fighting battle between GM and Bendix.

From a book AMONG WILDS WITHOUT PLACE: Lunar Rover and Last Monthly Descent Success Author Earl Swift. Copyright © 2021 author Earl Swift. From Custom House, a line of books from William Morrow / HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted with permission.

From 1962 to 1963, both GM and Bendix closely monitored the Surveyor program. Obviously, by the summer, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has set its requirements on a 100-pound rover, which seeks to push riders. The vehicle explores the site up to a mile away from the Explorers, while its pilots returning to Earth drive with the eyes of a radio. The laboratory warned companies planning to participate in the first phase of its design – the first phase of any new equipment program – that they are expected to offer a variety of ideas. Decisions must be made within seven weeks.

The deadline removed the difficulties. In October the two companies that ceased to represent each other – GM and Bendix – began working together. GM was ready with its design of six tires. His Surveyor’s lunar car was eight feet long and eighteen inches long and weighed ninety pounds – half and a half as heavy as a test bed, with a firm foot that never slipped off the jaw. On the Pavlics rocks of the “lunarium” of rocks, craters, and slopes outside the Santa Barbara lab, it climbed forty-five degrees, jumped 20 inches, and climbed stairs more than 30 inches.

Bekker and Pavlics had been working on the project for more than three years by then. Their biggest advancement this time: wheels. Once again, they were made of wire, but they were tied in wide mesh that resembled a bridge, and were made into fat donuts. Like the team’s handrails, they got lost when they hit an obstacle and took some of the difficulty of traveling to the surface. Worked or without a veil.

“We had a big program to try to find the wireless equipment that could survive in the remaining months,” recalls John Calandro. “Frank had developed a test machine that made us wireless.”

Properly equipped, the rover can be a marvel of computing, with subsystems provided by RCA Astro-Electronics and AC Electronics, the GM segment in Milwaukee: with stereo TV, high-speed navigation, and silver-zinc batteries they are also made in the form of the sun. But part of Santa Barbara’s job, the car, was learning to do more and less. The hardware was “constantly tested to see if something simple could work right away,” manufacturer Norman J. James recalls. The word “left” does not explode “was a repetitive word.

Bendix took a very different approach. His SLRV was a male-sided robot, two-voice, vocal, with curved legs and angles that end in small caterpillar meetings. The paths stand on their own following the uneven terrain. Drivers were required by law to reduce, accelerate, or change rails in one direction or another, and the cup connecting the two sections remained. On the moon, it can be powered by a powerful nuclear program – a small nuclear weapon – hanging from the back, firing with scientific weapons and antennae. It weighed a hundred pounds.

Along with the GM brand, the Bendix machine looks solid and uncluttered, and the small size doesn’t look very similar to the smaller Pavlics wire wheels. But Bendix was strong in its form until May 1964 when a team from the US Geological Survey, Caltech, and NASA took the two species to the volcanic area north of Flagstaff, Arizona, and freed them from the tough Bonito Lava. “We had a small section where he intervened in difficult situations,” Jack McCauley’s Geological Survey recalled a few years later. “The GM car was very good. It went right from A to B without any problems or turns.

“The poor Bendix car had tank-like treads made of rubber,” McCauley said. “The car started to crash. Instead, after halfway through, he had no residue. As a result, the GM thing obviously blessed us. ”

General Motors had won. Unfortunately, it did not include a rover in the month. The “Rover Boys,” as the experimental team became known, were impressed with the six wheels, but their potential did not meet the requirements of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: that is, “walking and photographing every ten meters, as well as using the entrance to measure the strength of the lunar surface predestined, “says McCauley. “Basically, just check on the grid.” Bendix produced the smallest rover on the project; GM had released too much. The Rover Boys have also unequivocally stated that no rover matches the requirements of the Surveyor program required, and that is one of the reasons why NASA removed the rover recently.

By that time, Ranger’s JPL program had given NASA a lunar view. By its very nature, it was a temporary sight: Ranger probes crashed on the moon while taking high-resolution images until the time it was affected. Created in 1959, the app, at times, seems like another frustrating game. After Ranger 1 and 2 traveled two rounds of development tests in 1961, the Rangers came 3 to 6, all of which were buses. Until July 1964, it was Ranger 7, when the program paid for the dirt. When the spacecraft landed on the moon, its cameras took off, and, for about seventeen minutes, it captured and published images of the surrounding area – all 4,316 photographs, some of them larger than those taken on Earth. The pictures did not relieve the fear of being inspired by Thomas Gold’s writings and interviews, but he assured that maria was very smooth until the arrival.