Goodyear to develop tires for Lockheed Martin lunar mobility car

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The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Firm, which equipped important merchandise for NASA’s Apollo program, together with the Apollo 11 mission which landed on the moon 53 years in the past, will proceed that custom—specializing in lunar car tires—by becoming a member of Lockheed Martin in its growth of a lunar mobility car in partnership with Basic Motors. (Earlier submit.)

Goodyear-lockheed-lunar-rover-concept-20220720

Lunar mobility idea


Since Apollo, Goodyear continued innovating alongside NASA to advance designs for a lunar car tire. The group of corporations intends to be the primary to ascertain extended-use business car operations on the Moon. Goodyear brings its huge experience in a mission-critical element—tires—to traverse the lunar floor.

NASA’s Artemis program to stay and work on the Moon has a transparent want for lunar floor transportation that we intend to fulfill with automobiles pushed by astronauts or operated autonomously with out crew. We’re creating this new technology of lunar mobility car to be obtainable to NASA and for business corporations and even different house businesses to assist science and human exploration. This method exemplifies NASA’s need for business to take the lead with business efforts that allow the company to be certainly one of many purchasers.

—Kirk Shireman, vice chairman of Lunar Exploration Campaigns at Lockheed Martin

Goodyear is drawing from its superior airless tire expertise used on Earth with micro-mobility, autonomous shuttles and passenger automobiles to advance lunar mobility and stand up to the difficult circumstances on the Moon. The businesses are already making use of present experience to the mission together with testing ideas in lunar soil take a look at beds.

All the pieces we study from making tires for the Moon’s extraordinarily troublesome working setting will assist us make higher airless tires on Earth. This can contribute to our finish aim of enabling mobility regardless of the place it takes place.

—Chris Helsel, senior vice chairman, World Operations and Chief Expertise Officer at Goodyear

The Apollo lunar rovers had been purposely constructed for only a few days of use on excursions inside 5 miles of their touchdown websites. Future missions might want to traverse rugged terrain over for much longer distances whereas working in larger temperature extremes. New tire capabilities will must be developed for years of sturdiness and even survive the evening that sees temperatures of under -250 levels Fahrenheit and daytime temps of greater than 250 levels Fahrenheit.

Lockheed Martin is leveraging its greater than 50-year-history of working with NASA on deep-space human and robotic spacecraft, resembling NASA’s Orion exploration-class spaceship for Artemis and quite a few Mars planetary spacecraft. The corporate may even handle the event of this system’s business enterprise operations and engagement with NASA and international house businesses. Lockheed Martin has additionally helped NASA discover each planet of the photo voltaic system, and continues to develop new applied sciences for future house missions.

One other teammate, MDA of Canada, not too long ago introduced its business robotic arm expertise can be used on the human-rated lunar mobility automobiles. The arm will present invaluable contributions as assist for astronauts in addition to enabling larger performance of the rover on totally autonomous missions.

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