It’s a one-way flight, obviously.
Audi has announced that its Lunar Quattro has a ticket to ride on a moon-bound spaceflight booked for late next year. Refined, finessed, and now 18 pounds lighter, the automaker’s plucky moon rover is bound for a rendezvous with another extraplanetary car.
That one, however, is a 1970s model.
Since Audi announced its desire to land a four-ring rover on the moon early last year, 16 of its top experts have put their brains together assembling a battery-powered lunar vehicle equipped with sure-footed all-wheel drive. Moon dust, as we all know, is terrible for traction.
It’s not boredom that’s compelling Audi to make this trip. The automaker, working with the German space travel company Part-Time Scientists, hopes to beat out 15 competing teams to win the Google Lunar XPRIZE. To win, a team must land a rover on the moon, drive it a minimum of 500 meters (about a third of a mile), and send back photos.
To make up for the cost of development, the prize includes a $30 million payday. Not bad, but spaceflight ain’t cheap.
With two 66.1-pound Audi Lunar Quattros at the ready, all that’s left is the trip. And it’s a loooong trip — 385,000 kilometers, or about 240,000 miles. Yesterday, the automaker announced that PT Scientists has secured a launcher booked through Spaceflight Inc., which should lift off near the end of 2017. Space News reports that the launch vehicle will almost certainly be a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster, which is how Elon Musk worms his way into this story.
Unlike a NASA mission, the Google Lunar XPRIZE doesn’t concern itself with mineral samples and the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws in space. Simply, the mission is all about getting there, period.
Still, the Audi team doesn’t plan to ignore space history or science. There’s extra room in the probe, so the team plans to ship equipment for NASA, the European Space Agency and Wikipedia. Also, the two rovers are headed to meet up with a relic of the past — the Apollo 17 Lunar Rover left behind in the Valley of Taurus-Littrow after the last manned moon mission in 1972. That vehicle was built with the help of General Motors.
[Image: Audi AG]
It’ll all be faked in a studio in Hamburg.
We already have 3 rovers running around on MARS. The moon? Big deal.
They can put a vehicle on the moon but they still can’t make a Diesel engine that runs clean without cheating.
There is no atmosphere on the Moon to pollute, so maybe we could send the offending TDIs there?
No atmosphere on the moon = no internal combustion.
The ultimate ‘cheat device’…
The results are still the same!
Better an Audi on the moon than a Lexus in Uranus, I’d say…
Uranus?
Gotta watch out for those Klingons!
Particularly the female ones.
That is what Lapo Elkann said.
But why?
Also, audis don’t even last the entirety of their lease period without electronic failures; I doubt they’ll survive the ~250,000 mile trip to the moon.
I always found it amusing that we left behind the two greatest symbols of America :
An American Flag and a Junked Car .
-Nate
You pretend to be simple but you ain’t.
That one cracked me up, Nate.