This is Hotel Mars episode N, CBS I in the World. I'm John Bats with my colleague and

co-host and friend David Livingston, Dr. Space of the Space Show. And we're having a wonderful

memorized lame straw with Rob Godwin, the publisher of RCG Publishing, which has a number

of wonderful stories about Apollo and early days of dreaming of landing on the moon and

what comes next. Well, we're on the moon right now with Apollo 16. The landing site was

chosen in what is called the day card site. Most significant to me in my memory of the

lunar roving vehicle, the LRV or the Dune Buggy. What was it, Rob? How was it put together?

What was the ambition of running around in the moon in that strange landscape?

It was built by Boeing, John, and it was designed to get them further afield than they

would be able to go on foot. And I think it had like a top speed on the moon of perhaps

as much as 16 or 17 kilometers an hour. It was designed to go faster than that, but it

was extremely light. They couldn't use pneumatic tires on the moon, so it had these piano

wire wheels, which allowed it to have some suspension as they were going around. It was

electrically powered, electric motors on two separate systems. It also had steering

at the front and the back, but it was light enough that the two astronauts on the moon

could actually pick it up bodily and move it around, which turned out to be a useful thing

on Apollo 16, because when they first offloaded it from the lander, it turned out the rear

steering wasn't working, and they didn't know why, and they were quite concerned about

that. So they loaded it up anyway, because they knew they were going to go out. Once they

got it loaded up, suddenly the rear steering started working, and they thought, okay, fine,

so off they went, and on one of their trips out in it, they were trying to go up a particularly

steep hill about a 20 degree angle, and the rear wheels stopped working again. So it got

...