ASTRONAUT:
00:00:29
This is really a rock and roll ride, isn't it?
KRIS VAN CLEAVE:
00:00:32
It was 1971 when America's love affair with the car went lunar. The Apollo Lunar Rover turned American moonwalkers into moon drivers, allowing astronauts to explore more than 50 miles of lunar crust and craters.
ASTRONAUT:
00:00:45
I'm glad they got this great suspension system on this thing.
JARET MATTHEWS:
00:00:49
The Apollo Lunar Rover was a phenomenal machine, but fundamentally, it had a very different job to do than the one we're doing. You just point the joystick whichever way you want to go. Super intuitive.
KRIS VAN CLEAVE:
00:00:59
Jaret Matthews is the Founder of Astrolab. On a back street in Hawthorne, California, he took us for a spin in a Zamboni-looking prototype of his company's 21st century Lunar Rover, called FLEX. The final design for NASA will look like this, a four-wheel drive electric vehicle that can rove on its own or carry two astronauts and supplies. It will operate for a year, transversing hundreds of miles across the lunar terrain. The lunar terrain vehicles have to be a mashup of the Apollo Lunar Rover to carry two suited astronauts, as well as something more modern, like the Perseverance Rover on Mars, and can be operated remotely from Earth. It kind of got to be a Swiss army knife vehicles. Absolutely, yeah.
KRIS VAN CLEAVE:
00:01:39
Astrolab is one of two companies NASA picked to build the first Moon buggies for the Moon base it plans to spend the next seven years developing near the South Pole. NASA also tapped Colorado-based Lunar Outpost to build a Moon buggy called Pegasus. A Blue Origin Lunar Lander will deliver each Rover to the lunar surface. NASA is paying Astrolab and Lunar Outpost about $220 million each. Lunar Outpost's CEO Justin Cyrus told us he sees an opportunity on the Moon beyond NASA. NASA wants to be one of many customers. NASA doesn't want to be the only customer. And the only way you can do that is creating a vehicle that is truly capable enough to allow for new activities on the lunar surface. You want to drive yourself? I'd love to. Steering with a joystick designed for the limited movement allowed by a spacesuit-- Now, we're really going. Now, we're cooking, huh? --cooking up a slow and steady ride to the moon and beyond. Kris Van Cleave, CBS News, Hawthorne, California.
