Across the Airless Wilds

The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings

Earl Swift

• Publisher: Custom House
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062986559
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Aeronautic & Astronautic Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

New York Times –bestselling Author: This history of NASA's lunar roving vehicle, including color photos, is "a joy to read from beginning to end" ( The Wall Street Journal, Ten Best Books of the Month). 8: 36 P.M. EST, December 12, 1972: Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt braked to a stop alongside Nansen Crater, keenly aware that they were far, far from home. They had flown nearly a quarter-million miles to the man in the moon's left eye, landed at its edge, and then driven five miles in to this desolate, boulder-strewn landscape. As they gathered samples, they strode at the outermost edge of mankind's travels. This place, this moment, marked the extreme of exploration for a species born to wander. A few feet away sat the machine that made the achievement possible: an electric go-cart that folded like a business letter, weighed less than eighty pounds in the moon's reduced gravity, and muscled its way up mountains, around craters, and over undulating plains on America's last three ventures to the lunar surface. In the decades since, the exploits of the astronauts on those final expeditions have dimmed in the shadow cast by the first moon landing. But Apollo 11 was only a prelude to what came later: While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trod a sliver of flat lunar desert smaller than a football field, Apollos 15, 16, and 17 each commanded a mountainous area the size of Manhattan. All told, their crews traveled fifty-six miles, and brought deep science and a far more swashbuckling style of exploration to the moon. And they triumphed for one very American reason: they drove. This fast-moving history of the rover and the adventures it ignited puts the reader alongside the men who dreamed of driving on the moon and designed and built the vehicle, troubleshot its flaws, and drove it on the lunar surface. Finally turning a spotlight on these overlooked characters and their missions, Across the Airless Wilds is a celebration of human genius, perseverance, and daring. "Such an enjoyable book... [A] thrilling account." — The Times (London) "Awe-inspiring... a brilliantly observed homage to the human spirit." — Newsweek "A fabulous summer read. The entire second half of [the] book is a riveting travelogue of six astronauts' 'lunar road trips' drawn from interviews and radio transcripts, augmented by priceless color photos that alone are worth the price of the book." — Virginian-Pilot

Part One

The Difference It Made

1

THE U.S. SPACE AND ROCKET CENTER ANNOUNCES ITSELF FROM miles away, with a needle against the sky that orients, at a glance, anyone in Huntsville, Alabama: if you can see the Saturn V, you can place where you are.

The rocket towers 363 feet over an especially smart precinct of a smart city in a state largely uncelebrated for its smarts. Just to the north lies a University of Alabama campus big on science and engineering. Clustered nearby are dozens of high-tech companies doing business behind locked doors and security cameras. South of the Saturn V lies the magnet for this brainpower: the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. The place that produced the rockets that carried America to the moon.

The Saturn is a well-executed fake, erected in 1999 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the first lunar landing. The U.S. Space and Rocket Center is not part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the federal agency that achieved that landing; it’s a museum operated by the state of Alabama. But it’s a good one, with an impressive collection of genuine space hardware and a world-famous Space Camp for aspiring astronauts, and with one of the earth’s three surviving real Saturn Vs on display inside.

I pulled into town one Wednesday in April 2019, spied the needle on the distant horizon, and followed it to the Space and Rocket Center. The mock Saturn had just received fresh paint in preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of that first moon landing, and the museum’s gift shop was stocked full of T-shirts, ball caps, coffee mugs, and toys commemorating July 20, 1969. It being a school day, only a few customers browsed the shop. Most were older than me—not surprising, perhaps, as I could recall little about Apollo 11; I remembered my parents’ excitement over the landing more than the event itself. It wasn’t until the last few Apollo missions that I paid much mind to what was happening up there. By then, I was a teenager, and some mornings read a newspaper. Plus, we’d moved to Houston, home to the astronauts and NASA’s center for manned spaceflight, and my eighth-grade classmates actually discussed lunar exploration.

But I remembered those later missions, too, for a distinction that set them apart, a new piece of gear the astronauts of Apollos 15, 16, and 17 carried with them. An addition that had redefined lunar exploration, space science, and NASA’s expectations of what could be achieved in brief visits to the moon’s inhospitable surface. The gift shop had no wares memorializing that transformative hardware, but I happened to know I could find it on display in the museum proper. Which is why I had driven eight hours to Huntsville: to see it in person, and to meet a man central to its creation.

My ticket bought me into the museum’s centerpiece building, the Davidson Center for Space Exploration. Its main floor is a single cavernous room, 476 feet long, 90 wide, and six stories high, down the middle of which runs its main exhibit. The Saturn V is displayed on its side and broken into its component stages to show off the engines on each. Three old-timers were seated together on a bench under the rocket’s enormous F1 engines, which jutted from the bottom of its S-IC booster stage. They are the strongest rocket engines ever put to use, and amid the museum’s bright, kid-friendly cheer, the brutal, elemental power manifest in their fat tangles of pipes, valves, and pumps was unnerving. Their fluted mouths, a dozen feet across and built to spout great tails of fire and thunder, were no less fearsome for their silence. The men on the bench were inured to the menace overhead. All wore white lab coats that identified them as museum docents and retired rocket scientists.

I stopped in front of the bench. They were in their eighties, by the looks of them, maybe older. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for Sonny Morea. Do you know where I could find him?”

“He was just here,” one of the men replied. On the right breast of his lab coat, beneath his name tag, was an embroidered logo bearing the legend “NASA Emeritus.”

“He’s here,” another said. “He’s around. He might have just stepped away for a minute.”

“He might be down there,” the first man told me, pointing to the Davidson Center’s far end. “That’s where he usually is, back in that corner.”

I thanked them and started that way, walking beneath the Saturn, which rests well off the floor on heavy steel cradles. Its scale borders on the absurd. The S-IC stage, essentially a flying gas can that muscled all 6.2 million pounds of the rocket off the pad and into the upper atmosphere, is 138 feet long and 33 feet in diameter; it occupies half the Davidson’s lofty headspace lying down. The S-II stage, which took the Saturn into the airless black, came after, just as big around and 82 feet long. I passed under the S-IVB, or third stage—narrower, at 21 feet, 8 inches across, but still a monster. It put the astronauts into orbit, sent them on their way to the moon, and carried, in a shroud at its top, the lunar module. Beyond was a mock-up of the comparatively tiny Apollo spacecraft, the payload for all the rocket below. The main act, it consisted of the service module (supplying power, air, water, and electronics to the crew) and the command module, otherwise known as the capsule.

It took me several minutes to walk the length of this behemoth, with requisite pauses to admire its audacity. Stacked and ready for liftoff, it had stretched more than three times the length of the Wright brothers’ first flight. Up under the capsule’s nose, four hundred feet from the old-timers at the tail, I saw that they’d been joined by a fourth figure in a lab coat. I hurried back to introduce myself.

I’d seen photographs of Saverio “Sonny” Morea taken in the late 1960s—nattily turned out, by the professional engineering standards of the day, in crisp oxford shirts, bow ties, and skinny-lapeled sport coats, his dark hair trimmed short on the sides in the prevailing NASA style. The photos hinted at a certain consistency of temperament: Whenever a flash went off, Sonny Morea seemed to wear an expression of expectant delight. They suggested that here was a guy who enjoyed conversation, liked people, didn’t sweat the little stuff.

Fifty years had passed since—he was now eighty-seven—but it was instantly clear that Morea’s long exposure to Earth’s gravity had done little to mask his cheer. We shook hands. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you got here,” he said, smiling. “Have you been down there to see it?” He had a crooner’s tenor still tinged with Richmond Hill, Queens, sixty-odd years after he left the old neighborhood—and with almost all of that time spent in Alabama, no less. “No,” I told him. “I didn’t get that far.”

“Well, then, let’s go have a look.”

Back up the length of the Saturn we ventured, Morea tilted forward about ten degrees and hurrying on very short steps to keep up with the lean. Past the rocket’s tip, the Davidson’s gallery was twilit, with spots illuminating a few Holy Grail items of Apollo history: the scorched command module, Casper, from Apollo 16, interior lit to show off the three “couches” its crew occupied; an A7L space suit, worn in Earth orbit and now encased in glass; and what we’d come to see.

The lunar rover—in NASA parlance, the lunar roving vehicle, or LRV—was just beyond reach behind a low barrier. The “moon buggy,” as the press insisted on calling it when it carried the astronauts around in the early seventies. A “spacecraft on wheels,” as Morea and his fellow engineers preferred to think of it. “There it is,” he said now. “What do you think?”

What I thought was that it looked just as I’d imagined it. All business. Built with the precision and purpose of all Apollo machinery. A wondrous meld of engineering and imagination, deceptively simple, conceived at a time when the available tools to work out its hidden complexities were slide rules, blackboards, and hand-drawn blueprints. “Wow,” I answered. “Amazing.” And I meant it, because I understood that I was beholding something truly revolutionary. And elegant. And rare.

Even as I spoke, though, it occurred to me that the uninformed observer might be less impressed. Suspicious, even: It wasn’t entirely clear that this rover was the real thing, because it was displayed with the Davidson Center’s one unalloyed disappointment, a mock-up of the lunar module that looked salvaged from a high school stage production. That aside, there was the vehicle itself, insofar as there was very little to it—it was tiny, and its seats looked like lawn chairs, and it lacked a body or a roof or a steering wheel or much of anything, besides wheels, that typically define a car. Next to the Saturn V reclining big as creation a few feet away, it looked like a weekend garage project abandoned well before its finish.

But it takes imagination to celebrate what’s missing in an object, along with what’s there, and the LRV was a feat of “less is more” engineering that was radical even by NASA’s standards. Its builders distilled everything essential to an earthbound off-roader to its indivisible minimum, its smallest and lightest and most fundamental iteration, then whittled even further. On Earth, it weighed 460-odd pounds—not much more than a single astronaut in his space suit—but on the lunar surface weighed a sixth as much, thanks to the moon’s weaker gravity. So it was that the four electric motors turning its wheels together churned out just one horsepower. You can buy a gutsier shop vac, but at less than eighty lunar pounds, that’s all the punch it needed.

On the job, it proved sturdy enough to shrug off a lot of abuse. Yet the museum’s example rested on a display stand that propped up its aluminum frame; without it, the chassis might have sagged under the pull of Earth’s gravity by now. If I were to step onto the floorboard, I’d snap it. I focused on its tires, which I’d long admired in pictures. They were the shape and size of all-season radials, only made of stainless steel mesh. They supported the rover on the moon, but here, minus the stand, would squash flat. Each, rim included, weighed just twelve pounds. Earth pounds.

“It doesn’t look like much,” Morea allowed. “It weighs next to nothing. But, you know, I worked on the Saturn for ten years before we started this. I worked on the F1 engines—I managed that program for seven years—and then I was sent in to help fix the J2 engines.” He turned to the rocket and nodded toward the fonts of hellfire on the second and third stages. “Couldn’t go anywhere without those. But it’s kind of crazy: of all the things I worked on, this is what I’ll probably be remembered for.”

I eyed the rover. “People can’t get their heads around rocket engines,” I suggested. “I look at one, and I can’t figure it out. This, I understand.”

“Yeah,” Morea said, nodding. “Who hasn’t driven a car?”

The machine seemed familiar enough fifty years ago that some of the press treated it as the inevitable, almost comic product of the most automotive people on Earth. Of course we’d send a car into space.

In truth, there was no “of course” about it. Basic layout aside, the rover had little in common with any other vehicle built in the nearly eighty years of the horseless carriage that preceded it, and bore no resemblance to any other 1969 General Motors product, which is essentially what it was. It was called on to cross country that no Earth car would encounter, in conditions that would cripple any terrestrial vehicle instantly: temperatures of minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and plus 250 in the sunshine; a surface of clingy, abrasive dust that could foul any moving part; fierce solar radiation; and a constant shower of micrometeoroids smaller than grains of sand but moving faster than bullets. All while wrapped in an airless vacuum.

Under the circumstances, mere survival would have set the rover apart. But it also carried twice its weight, despite its gossamer construction. And endured lengthy odysseys on which it climbed slopes that would test any jeep, clawed over foot-high rocks, thumped into and out of craters. And kept track of where it was on the lunar surface, so that if anything went wrong, it could point the fastest way back to the lunar lander. Not that anything could go wrong: operating nearly a quarter million miles from the nearest service station required the rover to be reliable, above all else, with redundancies for its major components. If one of its motors failed, it could run on the other three. If two motors failed, it could run on the remaining two. If three failed, well, all bets were off, but it might limp for a while on one. That it met the demands of lunar travel is remarkable even today, when our cars have become rolling computers, and our poor habits are sniffed out by sensors and alarms and automatic braking. But the rover was designed in 1969, when both automotive engineering and space technology relied on a far more primitive set of tools.

It evolved from ideas that are older still. Within NASA, the rover project is remembered not only for its success but for how quickly it gelled. The first machine was delivered to the Kennedy Space Center just seventeen months after the space agency awarded the contract to produce it, a fraction of the time Apollo hardware usually took. It had a long family history, however: The rover was shaped by nearly a decade of start-and-stop NASA studies into how best to explore the moon—inquiries that signaled just how big the agency was thinking at the time and also assumed that Apollo would be the first chapter in a long lunar campaign. The vehicles conceived in those inquiries were left on paper, unbuilt, but traces survived in the little machine that Morea and I now admired. Alloyed into its metal, and especially those exotic wheels, were years of sweat, experimentation, and creativity.

When NASA finally went ahead with the project, hundreds of people raced the clock to get it aboard the Saturn V. Little went according to plan. The project blew through its budget and threatened to overshoot its deadline by months. Careers were made and broken in the struggle to finish it. The man standing beside me in the Davidson Center came close to calling the whole thing off, and NASA’s higher-ups stood at the same precipice on numerous occasions.

Yet it got to the moon. In the face of myriad challenges it made it there and changed everything about Apollo.

2

CONSIDER THE TWO LUNAR MISSIONS OF 1971: APOLLO 14, WHICH landed in the moon’s rugged Fra Mauro region in early February, and Apollo 15, which six months later took its astronauts to a plain rimmed by sky-high mountains and a mammoth canyon, and carried the first LRV.

On their second excursi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endpapers
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One: The Difference It Made
• Part Two: Nation of Immigrants
• Part Three: Principal Considerations
• Part Four: “We Must Do This!”
• Part Five: A Painfully Trying Task
• Part Six: Across the Airless Wilds
• Part Seven: Tire Tracks
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Also by Earl Swift
• Copyright
• About the Publisher