Earlier this year, Apollo 14 had Alan Shepard and his version of a golf club. This July, Apollo 15 will have its own version of a golf cart. Folded, squeezed and packed into a storage compartment in the lunar module’s descent stage will be a four-wheeled battery-driven moon car called the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV). More simply known as Rover, the cart is built to travel at 10 mph and go 40 miles before its nonrechargeable batteries run down. The Apollo 15 mission plan calls for Rover to carry astronauts David Scott and James Irwin about 20 miles in three seven-hour explorations during their 86 hours on the moon. For safety’s sake Rover will travel only three to four miles from the LM at any time, which is the distance an astronaut can walk if need be. Nor will the vehicle exceed 6 mph unless an emergency occurs or in the unlikely event its drivers find a smooth, fast straight- away and decide to hold the first lunar drag race. Within those limits, though. the cart will make it possible for Irwin and Scott to do more exploring than all the other lunar astronauts put together.
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