NASA Picks Three Companies To Develop All-New Lunar Rovers And The Renders Look Pretty Cool

We’re going back to the moon. I’m not exactly sure when, but there are plenty of smart nerds at NASA figuring it all out; the Space Launch System (SLS) has already been launched successfully, and that launch also sent the new Orion crew capsule (sans crew) around the moon.

Before you know it, there will be a bunch of new men and women stomping around in the dusty one-sixth gravity of the moon. But are we content with making those astronauts walk everywhere, like a pack of chumps? No. Hell no. They’re going to want to drive, because of course they are, so they’re going to need cars. Moon cars. Rovers, of the lunar variety. Yesterday, NASA announced the three companies that were selected to “advance moon mobility for Artemis missions” which I guess is government contractor-talk for “making a moon car.”

Three companies have been selected by NASA for developing what is being called the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV): Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab. Each company seems to have very different approaches to the LTV problem, which could be why these three companies have been selected – to get the broadest depth of possible solutions. The maximum potential value of these contracts is $4.6 billion dollars, so there’s a lot at stake here. The contracts are indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts, which I had to look up, and seem to mean that there could be any number of units ordered within a set minimum and maximum.

Of course, we do still have three Lunar Roving Vehicles still parked on the moon, keys still in them, taken there by Apollo missions 15, 16, and 17. But the newest of those has been sitting there since 1972, un-garaged, and it’s probably just easier to develop a new one than pay off all the lunar parking tickets those things have no doubt accrued over the 50-something years since last driven. I know they “ran when parked” but I’m pretty sure the silver-oxide batteries they used are all very dead by now.

One interesting thing about the requirements for the new rover is that it should be able to function independently between crewed missions. According to Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston:

“We look forward to the development of the Artemis generation lunar exploration vehicle to help us advance what we learn at the Moon. This vehicle will greatly increase our astronauts’ ability to explore and conduct science on the lunar surface while also serving as a science platform between crewed missions.”

The part about functioning as a “science platform” is interesting, and I suspect implies some sort of autonomous operation, like the rovers sent to Mars, for example.

Would you like to see the whole news conference NASA had about the LTV? Sure you would!

Let’s look at the three approaches to lunar rovers. Up first, Intuitive Machine’s proposal, which has the evocative name Moon Reusable Autonomous Crewed Exploration Rover (MRACER):

Now, I suspect a lot of the bad-ass look of this thing comes from it being a render, and anything goes in a render – but it does look pretty cool. It’s got some big tweels, which seem to be developed by Michelin, and a pretty low-slung body with what may be some sort of high cargo platform at the rear? There are no technical details to speak of yet, so this is all we have to go on. It looks cool, and that’s half the battle, right?

Lunar Outpost’s entry is called Lunar Dawn, and uses what we terrestrial gearheads would call a cab-over or cab-forward design. Lockheed-Martin is calling it a “flight deck forward” design, even though this thing isn’t supposed to be flying.

This is from an article about the Lunar Dawn, and I just want to note something (emphasis mine):

NASA has awarded a Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services (LTVS) contract to the Lunar Dawn team, led by Lunar Outpost as the prime contractor along with its principal partner Lockheed Martin and teammates General Motors (GM), The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, and MDA Space. The diverse team combines proven robotic and human space exploration heritage, cutting edge technology and automotive industry strengths to create a true off-road vehicle for living and working on the Moon’s surface.

Do we really need to note “off-road” when we’re talking about the Moon? we know for a fact the Moon has approximately zero miles of roads. It’s all off-road! The nearest roads are 238,900 miles away!

The Lunar Dawn design has a large, re-configurable load bed with a robotic arm to help load and unload cargo or geological samples or alien carcasses or whatever. It’s also a cool-looking render.

From what I can tell, the FLEX rover from Astrolab seems to be the only one to have made it to the prototype hardware stage. That’s the prototype in the video above, which shows it in robotic mode. For carrying astronauts, it would be configured like this:

The astronauts would drive it while standing on a platform at the rear, freeing FLEX to carry cargo underslung in the middle and making for a pretty lean vehicle when empty. None of the three companies’ rover concepts are pressurized, relying instead on the astronauts’ spacesuits for life support, but the FLEX design appears to be the most minimal in terms of cabin space and astronaut protection.

Still, it seems an effective idea; you can see a little CG movie of the FLEX rover in action above, including a part that shows my biggest problem with the SpaceX Starship-based lunar lander: that long drop from the door to the surface.

That’s a long way to lower a rover. NASA seems okay with it, so who am I to judge, I suppose.

FLEX is scheduled to go to the moon in 2026 as part of SpaceX’s Starship landing tests, so hopefully that’ll happen on schedule and we’ll get to see how the rover does.

These are all interesting approaches to the driving-on-the-moon problem, and I’m curious to see more as they develop. When astronauts finally do land on the Moon again, a feat currently set for the Artemis V mission, I hope they’re able to find the old rovers and get them together for a vintage car show! They’ll just need spacesuit-wearing versions of those creepy time-out kid dolls to really sell it as a car show with cars that Boomers remember fondly.

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