Trucks on the moon!

The Johnson Space Center has a new model being developed for an exploration car on the moon. But this time it is a truck and it is a heavy-duty workhorse of a truck. Its official name is Chariot. On the downside, it’s a little pricey (at $2 million or so) and its top speed is a pokey 15 miles an hour. “America basically created the truck,” said Lucien Junkin, the chief engineer on the project. And so, he says, why not take a truck to the moon if NASA, as planned, takes humans back, as early as 2020? This model took a year to build. It looks kind of like what you’d get if a monster truck had a ménage à trois with a flatbed trailer and a medieval siege engine. This can be compared to in 1971 when the Apollo 15 carried the first rover to the moon. The Apollo 15 mission was the first to carry a lunar rover, which allowed the astronauts to travel much further from their landing site and sample a much wider variety of lunar materials. This new truck will help space exploration for years to come.