Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/23/sweet-new-moon-rover-from-toyo.html
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7 Likes
Their loss. There’s nothing like the feeling of cruising through the dunes with the top down and the solar winds blowing through your hair.
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I wonder what launch vehicle they’re planning to lift that Moon Assault Vehicle? How big of a payload fairing do you need? It also seems to be a bit of a question to how it is going to land safely. 2029 might honestly be a bit optimistic.
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It looks unnecessarily heavy. Like the early Lunar module designs it has a LOT of glass. And glass is heavier than aluminum, let alone more modern composites. It does not appear to have a circular cross section. There is a reason that aircraft, spacecraft, and even grain elevators are circular in cross section. Any other shape has to be reinforced to hold it’s shape when what is inside is under pressure. And every gram delivered to the moon is REALLY expensive to get there.
edited to add: So this has “stylists rather than engineers” written all over it.
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True but also sad considering how quickly they were able to put together the original Apollo program. It was less than a decade between Kennedy’s “let’s go to the moon because it would be badass” speech and the Apollo 15 astronauts doing donuts in their moon-buggy.
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Who wants to bet Elon gets drunk one night in the next few years and hatches a scheme to send a Tesla Model 3 and charging station to the moon, it autonomously drives around and eventually satellites confirm the Model 3’s tracks spell out “SUCK IT Senate Launch System!”
Two years before the SLS even gets off the ground.
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Don’t we mean Mars rover?
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We don’t yet have the technology to land something that massive on Mars. Someday, but not today.
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Look at the sweet wheels on that thing. Are those 20" rims?
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+1 for “Space: 1999” reference.
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She could drive my Toyota Moon Rover any day.
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They are looking to explore heavenly bodies…
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where’s the shrimp arms and external ev suits? gonna bring a lot of dust inside.
that looks…heavy.
no way that is getting to the moon in one piece in the same rocket that has astronauts (or anything else) in it.
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That will look really cool parked in front of the “Trump Tower - Moon”.
What? You don’t think that’s the reason Trump is pushing for space travel?
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Spaaaaaaace Priuuuuuuusss!
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What makes my (thankfully stable and non-metastatic) inner project planner deeply nervous is how the timeline appears to get rapidly more compressed as the hard goals actually arrive.
Delivery of ‘full-scale prototype’ is given ~2 years; designing the flight model happens before building and testing the engineering model, with both activities in a singe 2 year interval; building and testing the flight model(hopefully no surprises from the engineering model) is given 3 years; and then a lil’ ol’ manned moon mission is crammed into the last two years, because that’s clearly a solved problem.
Call me a pessimist; but budgeting 7 years to build a cool car and 2 to deliver it to the moon seems…risky.
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