Rover failures

As soon as Lunar Rover-1 had been released from Falcon, David Scott hopped on and began to check its instrument panel: "Okay. Amp-hours, 105 and 105. Amps, of course, are at zero.” The battery power seemed a little low as the batteries should have had 121 amp-hours each. His reading of current made sense because he had not yet begun to drive. He continued, "Okay, volts: on number 1 I’ve got about 82, and
number 2 is reading zero. Hmm." Fortunately battery 2 was fine and the zero reading was an instrumentation fault. Nonetheless, they had not even begun to drive yet were seeing a slew of niggling problems.

Scott then began to check the rover’s major functions. “Hey. Jim. you can probably tell me if I’ve got any rear steering.’’

"Yeah, you have rear steering.” replied Irwin.

"Okay. But I don’t have any front steering.”

The rover had been designed with independent steering on both front and rear wheels. This not only made it highly manoeuvrable, it also gave redundancy. Loss of one steering system would not inhibit it much. Scott and Irwin set off regardless, and completed their first traverse satisfactorily.

Next day, before they set out on their second traverse, Joe Allen in Houston asked Scott to take another look at the front steering. On powering up the system Scott got a pleasant surprise. "You know what I bet you did last night. Joe’.’ You let some of those Marshall guys come up here and fix it, didn’t you?” NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center had been responsible for the development of the rover, w hich was built by Boeing.

"They’ve been working. That’s for sure,” said Allen.

"It works, Dave?” laughed Irwin.

"Yes, sir. It’s working, my friend.”

"Beautiful.” said Irwin.

"Lot of smiles on that one. Dave,” said Allen. "We might as well use it today."

Scott agreed. "Boeing has a secret booster somewhere to take care of their rover!”