While Apollo LRVs carried up to two astronauts seated at its controls like a car, FLEX passengers - one or two at a time - ride standing in the back, driving the vehicle with a joystick. FLEX can move just as swiftly.Īpollo astronauts found "they spent just as much time off the ground as on it at that speed, so it's kind of a practical limit for the moon," where gravity is one-sixth that of Earth, said Matthews, a former rover engineer for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. manned missions to the Moon, in December 1972.Īpollo 17's lunar roving vehicle set a moon speed record of 17.7 kmph. If NASA adopts FLEX and its modular payload platform for Artemis, it would become the first passenger-capable rover to ply the lunar surface since Apollo 17, the last of six original U.S. Other aerospace companies have announced new lunar rover design concepts, "but so far I believe, we're the only ones who have produced a working prototype of this scale and capability," Matthews told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. "For humanity to truly live and operate in a sustained way off Earth, there needs to exist an efficient and economical network all the way from the launch pad to the ultimate outpost," Astrolab founder and CEO Jaret Matthews said in a statement announcing the rover's development.
Unlike the 1970s Apollo-era Moon buggies or the current generation of robotic Mars rovers tailored for specialised tasks and experiments, FLEX is designed as an all-purpose vehicle that can be driven by astronauts or by remote control.īuilt around a modular payload system inspired by conventional containerised shipping, FLEX is versatile enough to be used for exploration, cargo delivery, site construction and other logistical work on the moon, the company says. A Los Angeles-area startup founded by a veteran spaceflight robotics engineer unveiled on Thursday its full-scale, working prototype for a next-generation lunar rover that is just as fast as NASA's old "Moon buggy" but is designed to do much more.Īstrolab executives say the four-wheeled, car-sized FLEX rover is designed for use in NASA's Artemis programme, aimed at returning humans to the Moon as early as 2025 and establishing a long-term lunar colony as a precursor to sending astronauts to Mars.
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