General Motors and Lockheed Martin will help astronauts reach the moon’s dangerous South Pole.
GM announced Wednesday it is partnering with the aerospace and defense company to develop the next generation of electric lunar roving vehicles that will travel greater distances than those did in the past. It provided no financial details of the partnership.
The vehicles will be used for NASA’s Artemis program. On its website, NASA describes Artemis as “an ongoing space mission … with the goal of landing the first female astronaut and next male astronaut on the moon’s South Pole by 2024.”
That landing will be the U.S. space agency’s first crewed moon mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. The mission to send humans, including a person of color, back to the moon is so that they can explore and conduct scientific experiments.
The rover vehicles are key to the next manned-moon mission because they will allow scientists to study such things as the ice on the moon, which will, in turn, help them understand the creation of Earth, said Kirk Shireman, vice president of lunar exploration campaigns at Lockheed Martin.
“To land the next woman and man on the moon you need to land on a flat surface, but science likes boulders,” Shireman said. “So we want to land astronauts safely. But the interesting places might be in the shadow of a crater, so how do you get there? That’s why we’re working with GM on developing these rovers.”
The rovers will be unpressurized and made of lightweight, strong, long-lasting and “resilient materials … exactly what those are, is in formulation,” Shireman said. He said initially, the rovers will carry two astronauts with the idea of expanding their size to hold more people in the future.
Shireman said the farthest astronauts have traveled from the landing site has only been a few miles, so expanding that range, “is really going to open up the moon for us, for scientists and for other commercial activities. Where this goes? It’s got huge potential.”
But Shireman stopped short of saying what the future rover vehicles’ range will be, noting that it is 6,800 miles to go around the entire moon. Past rovers have traveled just a few miles.
“So somewhere between 3.2 miles and 6,800 miles is the goal,” Shireman said.
GM and Lockheed Martin have been discussing the proposed moon program for about a year now. When NASA issues a request for proposal, the two anticipate responding to it in the third or fourth quarter, said Jeff Ryder, vice president of growth and strategy for GM Defense, a wholly-owned subsidiary of GM.
Both GM and Lockheed Martin have a long history of working on space programs.
“General Motors made history by applying advanced technologies and engineering to support the Lunar Rover Vehicle that the Apollo 15 astronauts drove on the moon” in 1971, said Alan Wexler, GM’s senior vice president of Innovation and Growth. “We plan to support American astronauts on the moon once again.”
In the 1960s, GM tested and manufactured the inertial guidance and navigation systems for the entire Apollo moon program, including Apollo 11 and the first human landing in 1969.
GM also put the first electric car on the moon some 46 years ago when it helped develop the electric Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), including the chassis and wheels for the LRV that was used on Apollo’s 15 through 17 missions.
NASA wants a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) for the Artemis program that will enable astronauts to explore the moon’s surface at greater distances than previously.
GM said the Apollo rovers of the past traveled only 4.7 miles from the landing site. The next-generation lunar vehicles are being designed to go “significantly farther” including the first excursion of the moon’s South Pole, where it is cold and dark with a rugged terrain.
The LTV is the first of many vehicles that the Artemis program will need, GM said.
GM said it will use its autonomous driving technology to help provide safer and more efficient operations on the moon. The self-driving systems, GM said, will allow the rovers to prepare for human landings, enhance the range of travel and help with transporting scientific payloads and conducting experiments.
Lockheed Martin said it will lead the team. It has more than 50 years of working with NASA on deep-space human and robotic spacecraft. Lockheed Martin has built spacecraft and systems that have gone to every planet and been on every NASA mission to Mars, including building 11 of the agency’s Mars spacecrafts. It was a significant player in the space shuttle program and International Space Station power systems, too.
“Surface mobility is critical to enable and sustain long-term exploration of the lunar surface,” said Rick Ambrose, executive vice president, Lockheed Martin Space. “These next-generation rovers will dramatically extend the range of astronauts as they perform high-priority science investigation on the moon that will ultimately impact humanity’s understanding of our place in the solar system.”
GM’s Ryder said the companies will share more details about the program and cost for it in the future.
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