Lunar Roving Vehicle: Spacecraft on Wheels

Paper presented to the Automobile Division of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers at meetings in London, Leeds, and Birmingham, September 1973, by Boeing engineering manager E. G. Cowart.

Traces the vehicle’s design lineage from two earlier Marshall Space Flight Center studies, the enclosed MOLAB (1964–65) and the open-frame LSSM (1966–67), through Boeing’s 1969 contract award (with General Motors’ Delco Electronics Division supplying the mobility subsystems) to the vehicle that flew on Apollo 15–17. Gives major dimensions and payload figures for l.r.v.-3 (521 kg carried, more than twice the vehicle’s own weight), and closes with excerpts from the Apollo 17 crew’s post-flight debriefing on driving technique and the rover’s performance at Taurus-Littrow.