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NASA Wants Self-Driving Or Remote-Controlled Vehicles For Lunar Astronauts
NASA has announced that they have hired three companies to come up with preliminary designs for vehicles to take NASA astronauts around the lunar south polar region in the coming years.
These vehicles would be able to self-drive around as robotic explorers, similar to NASA’s rovers on Mars.
(Lunar Outpost's design)
NASA had asked for proposals of what it called the lunar terrain vehicle, or L.T.V., that could drive at speeds up to 9.3 miles per hour, travel a dozen miles on a single charge and allow astronauts to drive around for eight hours.The agency will work with the three companies for a year to further develop their designs. Then NASA will choose one of them for the demonstration phase.
The L.T.V. will not be ready in time for the astronauts of Artemis III, the first landing in NASA’s return-to-the-moon program, which is currently scheduled for 2026.
The idea of having an autonomous vehicle or autobus that could be used by astronauts on a distant world can be found in Tidal Moon, by Stanley G. and Helen Weinbaum, published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1938. Of course, on Ganymede, you could always take the local transportation...
THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold, it was certainly preferable to traveling by hipp. But hipp travel was unavoidable from here on. The trip to Aquia verged on the wet side of the planet—the side from which burst the mighty floods. So, added to steep, rocky drops, impassable by autobus, were the dank, muddy flats which only the hipp could traverse.
(Hipp from 'Tidal Moon' by the Weinbaums)
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