Shaping the Moonscape: Workers Ready Course for NASA’s 15th Annual Great Moonbuggy Race in Huntsville, Ala., April 4-5

Shaping the Moonscape: Workers Ready Course for NASA’s 15th Annual Great Moonbuggy Race in Huntsville, Ala., April 4-5

Each year around this time, John Tripp walks across a lunar surface, pondering the challenges ahead for explorers brave enough to take on its cratered terrain. For now, his “moon” is a winding ribbon of cement footpaths looped around Huntsville’s famed U.S. Space and Rocket Center, where Tripp is a construction foreman.

By month’s end, a half-mile of the paths will be transformed into a harsh lunar landscape that will test the engineering savvy and physical endurance of about 400 high school and college students on 68 teams converging here April 4-5 for NASA’s 15th annual Great Moonbuggy Race. The event is organized by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

The students, hailing from 20 states, Puerto Rico, Canada, India and Germany, are coming to race lightweight moonbuggies they designed, based on the original lunar rovers first used during the Apollo 15 moon mission in 1971. Tripp’s construction team will greet them with 17 unique course obstacles, built of plywood and old tires, and covered with 20 tons of gravel and 5 tons of sand. All of it will be reshaped into moon-like ridges, craters, sandy basins and lava-etched “rilles.”

The course was designed in 1993 by Dr. Larry Taylor, a lunar geologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Dr. J.M. Wersinger, a physics professor at Auburn University in Auburn, Ala., and Marshall’s University Affairs Officer Dr. Frank Six. It proved so challenging that race planners began adding hay bales for added safety; about 175 bales will line the course this year. Even so, seatbelts are a requirement.

Read the complete Press Release