More than 100 student teams from around the world are set to face off this weekend (April 9 and 10) in NASA’s 17th annual Great Moonbuggy Race in Huntsville, Ala.
Participating students will race their own specially-designed lunar vehicles, built to be sturdy, collapsible and lightweight. The goal is to address the engineering problems presented by the moon’s rugged terrain. The contest is inspired by the Apollo-era buggies driven across the moon’s surface by astronauts in the space missions of the 1970s. The student moonbuggies are constructed of bike tires, aluminum and composite-metal parts.
Each moonbuggy must be human-powered and piloted by two students, one female and one male (props for gender equality!) Just as pairs of Apollo moonwalkers had to unload and prepare their lunar rover for travel, race drivers must be able to assemble their collapsed vehicle and carry it some 20 feet to the start of the race course, reports local NBC affiliate WAFF.
The half-mile course includes sand and gravel pits, lunar-type craters, humps, bumps and other obstacles. Top prizes are awarded to the three teams in the high school division and three in the college division that post the fastest buggy assembly and race times.
Some 1,088 high school, college and university students from 20 states and Puerto Rico, Canada, Germany, Bangladesh, Serbia, India and Romania will descend on the US Space and Rocket Center for the competition.
The Great Moonbuggy Race is organized annually by the Marshall Space Flight Center, and has been hosted by the US Space and Rocket Center since 1996. It’s just one of many NASA initiatives designed to get the country’s next generation of scientists, engineers and explorers interested in space projects. Past participants have indeed gone on to work for NASA as adults.
For more information about the competition, check out NASA’s Moonbuggy page. You can also watch WAFF’s live stream of the races below. Welcome to the space age!
Photo of Apollo 15 Lunar Rover by Bubba73 via Wikimedia Commons.