GM's most widely traveled 1971 model was built for the moon

When President John Kennedy issued his famous 1961 proclamation urging America to put a man on the moon, most people thought only about the rockets and air travel. But some folks realized that, if we ever got there, our astronauts would need a set of wheels.

So General Motors helped build the only car ever driven on the moon.

GM's link to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration began decades before the automaker and Boeing Co. were awarded the Lunar Roving Vehicle contract.

Since the late 1940s, GM's AC Spark Plug Division had worked on military contracts for guidance and inertial navigation systems, initially to guide planes. The project had morphed into guidance systems for military missile systems. AC's Milwaukee operation helped create a Titan III intercontinental ballistic missile so accurate that it was aimed at a specific window in the third floor of the Kremlin.

NASA gave AC Spark Plug the contract for the Apollo spacecraft's guidance and navigation systems. AC engineers were key players in creating the Apollo 11 guidance system for the historic moon landing in 1969.

To give an idea of the difficulty of the telemetric task of sending a spacecraft to the moon, The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 26, 1968, described it as "a rifleman riding a bobbing horse on a merry-go-round and trying to shoot down a curveball thrown in a baseball game a mile away."

They got it almost right. Except that the speeding bullet would have to orbit and then land softly on the surface of the baseball before it hit the catcher's mitt.

But for all the work GM did in spacecraft telemetry, it is probably better known as the co-developer of the Lunar Roving Vehicle, first used during the Apollo 15 mission on July 31, 1971. It was the fourth manned mission to the moon, and the vehicle gave astronauts far greater range in exploring and analyzing the terrain.

Boeing was the prime contractor, and GM's Delco Defense Electronics Division in Santa Barbara, Calif., supplied the wheels, four-wheel drives, steering, suspension, brakes, steering controller and drive control electronics. Delco also built an Earth version for astronaut training.

Driving on the moon had little to do with driving on Earth, and even the simple things had to be looked at differently. Perhaps that's why the project manager, Sonny Morea, was a NASA engineer with no experience with automobiles.

"Typically, a new vehicle takes three or four years to develop. We had just 17 months to develop it, test it, qualify it for lunar flight and deliver it," Morea said in a recent interview. "We had to do design and testing almost concurrently. We were still testing at the time we were assembling the flight vehicle."

Morea had two big development challenges. One was folding a vehicle the size of a Cadillac into a 4-by-4-by-4-foot space on the side of the lunar lander. The other was creating a vehicle that weighed 460 pounds — but could handle 1,200 pounds of payload.

But the to-do list went much farther than that.

Because an internal combustion engine wouldn't work in the partial vacuum of the moon, the vehicle had to be battery-powered. Should the vehicle even have wheels, as opposed to it walking or tumbling across the lunar terrain?

And if wheels were the way, the construction had to be that of a spun-aluminum skeleton, since the moon's nighttime temperatures of minus 200 degrees would turn rubber as brittle as glass.

There were hundreds of tiny but important questions, such as:

-- How would the astronauts fasten seat belts with their spacesuit gloves? (Velcro.)

-- Did all vehicle surfaces have to be rounded off so as not to accidentally tear the astronauts' spacesuits? (Yes, most of them.)

-- How do you steer the vehicle wearing a bulky spacesuit? (Use a T-bar instead of a steering wheel.)

-- Without a magnetic field on the moon, how would a driver navigate back to the spacecraft if he gets lost? (A directional gyro and odometer.)

Then there was the problem of prototyping. Because there was no way to replicate the moon's gravity — one-sixth that of Earth — prototypes had to be stiffer and heavier on Earth than the final version for the moon. In essence, there was some chance the lunar version might not operate properly.

And talk about an owner's manual. The astronaut's introduction to the Lunar Roving Vehicle was 221 pages. It took six pages to explain how to start the LRV. Since the auto club wouldn't make a service call for a breakdown, the troubleshooting chart ran 12 pages. The astronauts even had to park the vehicle a specific way, depending on the angle of the sun in the sky — as if flying in space didn't give astronauts enough things to remember.

But in a feat of product development magic, the moon-bound vehicle was delivered on time.

And the astronauts loved it.

"By golly, this Rover is remarkable," Col. David Scott said during his Apollo 15 lunar excursion. "We climbed a pretty steep hill and didn't realize it. This is a super way to travel. It's easy to drive. No problem at all."

The three LRVs — one each built for Apollo missions 15 through 17 — might be the most valuable collector cars GM ever made, given that the cost to retrieve them from the moon's surface might be a bit steep.

And the initial cost? Boeing's winning bid for the LRV program was a low-balled $19 million. But the final reimbursed cost was double that.

The Lunar Roving Vehicles were used only on three missions. Yet, next to Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon and Alan Shepard's hitting a golf ball a country mile, the sight of astronauts cruising in the LRV is perhaps the strongest image most people have of the moon missions.