Ohio's Goodyear To Reinvent Wheel: NASA Needs Tires For Trips On Moon

AKRON (TDB) -- NASA's Glenn Research Center is collaborating with Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. to design a set of wheels for a new fleet of lunar rovers. This time, the vehicles will be bigger than the small dune buggies that astronauts drove around the moon in the 1970s. These new tires are supposed to be mounted on transport and construction vehicles. NASA already has the preliminary designs of the vehicles on paper, as the illustration shows.

The U.S. space program plans to return to the moon by 2020 and set up a permanent manned base. Goodyear is the nation's largest tire-maker and worked on the tires used on Apollo 15's lunar rover, which was more like a battery powered golf cart that shuttled astronauts while they picked up rocks near their landing site. It was the first car driven on the moon.

There were two other rovers built and driven during the Apollo program. The vehicles could go about 8 mph and the tires were piano-wire contraptions equipped with cleats to dig into the dusty, rocky surface for traction.

NASA Glenn is in suburban Cleveland and said it is putting seed money into innovative technologies that include designs of tires for moon cars, buses and trucks.

"Goodyear, which developed the original tires for the Apollo lunar lander, is working to develop a new generation of airless, non-ribber, wire mesh tire to allow for use of heavier, longer-range exploration and lunar construction vehicles required for NASA's exploration goals. New tools will be developed to assess the tire structure as it relates to various terrains, both on the moon and on Earth."

Sandusky, Ohio: Town Gets Major Role In Mankind's Trip to Mars

CLEVELAND (TDB) -- NASA says a test facility in Sandusky near Lake Erie will be used to simulate spaceflight and launch conditions for Orion, the vehicle that will carry manned crews into orbit for an eventual return to the moon, and then on to Mars. The space agency said $63 million worth of experimental shakedowns on Orion will take place at the Space Power Facility over a five-year period starting later this year.

Orion is supposed to fly with astronauts aboard by 2014. The plan is to head back to the moon in 2020. It looks more like a traditional space capsule from the Apollo days than the space shuttle.

NASA said it is going to snazz up the 100-by-122 foot Space Power Facility, which is the world's largest thermal vacuum chamber.

"The environmental tests are designed to demonstrate the ability of Orion hardware to meet specified performance requirements in simulated environmental conditions such as those experienced during launch, in-orbit operations and re-entry. Thermal, acoustic, and mechanical vibration and electromagnetic compatibility testing will be conducted on Orion's full assembly. The launch abort system, crew module, service module and spacecraft adapter will be tested."

Glenn, in Cleveland, is leading development of Orion. Ohio has a long and glorious history in aviation, starting with the Wright Brothers who were the first to fly and build an airplane. Now it is back in business, and as the spacecraft is developed and tested the news will only go to show off the state as a high-tech, highly scientific location. It will help shed some of the decimated Rust Belt doomed manufacturing-base image. This is great news.