Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift, 2021, Harper Collins, New York was one of my Christmas presents. The subtitle, The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings, makes clear what the book is about.

The author writes, in a discussion of the Apollo 14 mission, “the moon played tricks on them. The horizon was weirdly close. The sky was utterly black. The gray surface concealed its features behind swells and declivities. And the astronauts’ perception of size and distance was jumbled by the absence of … visual yardsticks … so that a large rock hundreds of yards away looked no different from a smaller one close by. The same was true of craters…”

This book is an extended discussion of how the Lunar Rover came to be designed, and then how it was used. The book is fascinating and very tightly constructed. It includes a LOT of technical detail about wheel design and dirt properties. Several companies bid on the rover. Swift explains the different designs they were using for the wheels, and they were very different.

The author makes clear that much of what was accomplished on the last three Apollo missions was dependent on the Rover, to get the astronauts at least some distance away from their landing places. They came back with rock samples from several miles away, instead of several hundred feet, still just a tiny fraction of the moon’s surface.

Without wheels, and the guidance system that came with the rover, the astronauts had a terrible time working out where they were. The ground always had more craters than had been seen from pictures. It had more rocks that had to be navigated around. Shallow craters could be taken in stride, but slightly deeper ones were incredibly dangerous. Once in you’d never get out since the sides simply caved in as you tried to walk up them. Craters that were too steep to navigate were a problem for the Lunar Rover as well, but they could be circumnavigated without completely wearing out the travelers.

Best link ever… https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130129.html  My favorite website APOD has a video of driving the lunar rover during the Apollo 16 mission. Just go watch it. You can see how incredibly rough the terrain actually is when you watch the bouncing. The rover was able to climb very steep hills without falling over. At times the astronauts simply picked it up and turned it when they didn’t dare try a U-turn. That’s an amazing design feature, dependent upon the much lighter gravity on the moon.

https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/apollo-17/  These pictures include the the night launch of the Saturn V, most amazing at the time…

Sky and Telescope has an article about Apollo 17 in pictures. See below. (There are two links that are the same but I can’t delete one of them… sorry!)

And just to be up to date… https://www.nasa.gov/technology/nasa-sets-sights-on-mars-terrain-with-revolutionary-tire-tech/ A lot of the ideas that were floated to create the Lunar Rover were then used to help design the Martian rovers. This article discusses yet another way to create the kind of wheels necessary for exploration in an environment with big rocks and baby craters everywhere. The new idea here is using a metal that springs back into shape.

He who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name… Amos 5:8

Apollo 17 in Pictures: “God Willing, as We Shall Return”

Apollo 17 in Pictures: “God Willing, as We Shall Return”