Sometime in the next decade, Americans will hopefully once again land on the moon. When they do, they’ll have a Lunar Terrain Vehicle to tool around in. Three groups are now competing to make that vehicle, with a focus on the design of the wheels.
Stick your standard rubber car tires on the moon—especially at its south pole in the middle of the lunar night, where temperatures can reach –300 degrees Fahrenheit—and nothing good will happen. The tires will sink into the loose lunar soil, and the intense solar radiation on the moon, which lacks a protective atmosphere, will instantly begin to break down the rubber. Then the extreme cold will freeze the tires, rendering them unable to deform or compress, and making them harder to roll. They’ll get brittle and shatter.
The issues only get worse over time. The moon’s soil, or lunar regolith, is extra abrasive, says Florian Vilcot, an innovation expert and designer at Michelin. That abrasiveness threatens to quickly tear up any unequipped material. That’s particularly important for the LTV because Michelin is designing a tire to last 10 years and travel more than 6,200 miles. (By comparison, the Lunar Rover Vehicles or “moon buggies” involved in the Apollo missions in the early 1970s each traveled about 18 miles.)
As with all things related to space travel and NASA, an incredible amount of planning is being done years in advance. By contrast, the headline on the linked article appears to have not even gotten the second pass it badly needed:
Humans Are Going to the Moon’s South Pole. This Is How They’ll Drive There
The proposed wheels for the LTV are high-tech, but they’re not so high-tech that it’s somehow possible to drive through space from the Earth to the moon.
