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NASA's New Lunar Rover, Now Testing In Arizona
MarkWhittington writes "NASA has unveiled a new prototype lunar rover, called the Chariot, a production version of which is hoped to be operational on the lunar surface by 2019. NASA is now testing the Chariot lunar rover in Arizona, on terrain that resembles the lunar surface." Perhaps Arizona's an even closer match to the moon's surface than is Texas, or Moses Lake, WA where NASA was testing the last time we mentioned Chariot. (Here's a bit of video from the Texas round.)
first off, CHARIOT got to this point from nothing in 2 years. second, while you can say "we've been to the moon before" and be right, it's completely apples and oranges if you take even one small step beyond that.
0. i'll stick this one on top even though it's really part of another answer: You Aren't Excited About It. honestly that's the biggest problem. think hard about why your first impulse was to shrug this project off as slow and unexciting after you've read the other answers. then think about what's actually happening. then, and i'm completely serious, get excited about it! it's really exciting stuff! but this is a chicken-and-egg situation.
1. relative funding level. in this case, more money would actually help a *lot*. besides that, a lot of the money is going into rockets these days. the stuff the rockets are going to move around is sort of back-burner and shoestring (relatively speaking). unfortunately, all of this really needs to happen in parallel, because we don't want to get there and then have to figure out what we're going to do and how. Constellation is called an "architecture" for a reason. but the budget just doesn't support doing the necessary rocket stuff while adequately funding the basic conceptual experiments that give the rocket stuff raison d'etre. the analogs barely happened this year - in particular this one.
2. the NASA of Apollo was a completely single-minded organization. almost everything is different now, and NASA does a lot of work - very important work - that is not related (directly) to "putting stuff on the moon." but there is also a sad story to tell, mostly related to the competition for funding between 4 mission directorates spread across a bunch of centers (and their political relationships). at this point i'm almost convinced that it would be impossible for any single person to know everything that NASA is doing *even conceptually*. and going back to the first sentence of this point... the entire country was fully behind Apollo. it seems like hardly anyone even notices Constellation.
3. more complexity -> more testing. next time NASA astronauts are on the moon they're going to be doing a heck of a lot more than landing, grabbing a few rocks and going home. we're talking lunar infrastructure and long term experimentation, multi-day traverses, etc. this is orders of magnitude more difficult than Apollo, and from what i've heard/seen, Apollo people involved in the current effort would not hesitate to agree with what i'm saying here. the new rover is not going to be abandoned as junk after a few uses. this is a modular concept with a lot of intended uses.
4. did i mention funding? seriously. this is not a "mythical man month" problem at this point. funding comes from congress. congress allocates funds according to the demands of constituencies. that's you.
want this to look and feel more like Apollo did in its day? support it. especially politically, but even just talking about it and attempting to appreciate what's being done would help.
-anonymous from flagstaff