University of Silesia in Katowice

Did you know that…

In 1961 NASA announced a competition for a lunar vehicle. A few years later, the results were announced, and the winner was Mieczyslaw Bekker and his Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV). General Motors and Boeing made the machine; the vehicle weighed about 200 kg and was 3.25 meters long and 1.8 meters wide. It could carry 500 kg of cargo and cover a distance of 100 km. In the Apollo 15, 16, and 17 missions, the rovers of his design traveled about 91 kilometers. They enabled the collection of rock samples and exploration of terrain that would have been impossible to traverse in spacesuits alone. All three machines remained on the Moon.