They are still there. Three of them. Parked in the grey, powdery dust of the lunar Highlands, the Apollo Lunar Rovers represent one of the most audacious engineering flexes in human history. We didn't just walk on the moon; we drove on it. We did donuts in the regolith. We pushed the limits of battery technology in a vacuum where the temperature swings are enough to shatter most terrestrial machinery.
It’s been over fifty years.
Honestly, it’s easy to forget how weird these things were. They weren't "cars" in any sense we recognize today. They had no steering wheels. No windshields. No doors. The tires weren't rubber—they were made of zinc-coated steel strands because air-filled tires would have popped like balloons the second they hit the vacuum of space. When you look at the photos from Apollo 15, 16, and 17, the Rovers look like lawn furniture bolted to a gold-foil chassis. But that lawn furniture allowed Jim Irwin and David Scott to cover over 17 miles of lunar terrain. Before the Rover, astronauts were limited by how far they could walk while hauling heavy life-support backpacks. After the Rover? The moon became a playground for geologists.
The Engineering Behind the Apollo Lunar Rovers
Building a vehicle for the moon meant solving problems that don't exist on Earth. Boeing and Delco Electronics had to figure out how to keep a motor cool when there is no air to carry the heat away. You can’t use a radiator. Instead, they used wax.
Wait, wax?
Yeah. They used phase-change materials—specifically paraffin—to absorb heat from the electronics. When the wax melted, it soaked up the thermal energy. When the astronauts parked in the shade or during the "night" cycles, the wax would re-solidify. It was a low-tech solution for a high-tech nightmare.
The Apollo Lunar Rovers were powered by two 36-volt silver-zinc potassium hydroxide non-rechargeable batteries. These weren't Teslas. You couldn't plug them in. Once those batteries were dead, the Rover was a statue. NASA's specs required a range of about 57 miles, though they never actually drove that far. Why? Safety. NASA had a "walk-back" rule. You could never drive further than the distance you could realistically walk back to the Lunar Module if the Rover died. If the motor seized five miles out, you had to have enough oxygen in your suit to hike back. This limited their exploration radius significantly, even though the machine was capable of more.
💡 You might also like: How Big is 70 Inches? What Most People Get Wrong Before Buying
Handling the Moon's 1/6th Gravity
Driving on the moon is a mess.
If you hit a bump at 8 miles per hour in one-sixth gravity, you don't just bounce; you launch. Astronauts reported that the Rover felt "flighty." It fishtailed constantly. On Apollo 16, Charlie Duke and John Young nearly flipped the thing while doing high-speed maneuvers. The steering was a T-shaped handle located between the two seats. You pushed it forward to go, pulled back to brake, and tilted it left or right to turn.
It was essentially a glorified joystick.
Why We Left Them Behind
People often ask why we didn't bring them back. The answer is simple and brutal: weight.
Every single gram of material brought back from the lunar surface to Earth required an exponential amount of fuel to lift off. A rock sample is worth more to a scientist than a used fender. To get the Lunar Module's ascent stage off the moon, the astronauts had to strip the cabin of everything they didn't absolutely need. They threw out boots, cameras, and life support backpacks. They certainly weren't going to hoist a 460-pound (Earth weight) vehicle back into orbit.
The Apollo Lunar Rovers were designed to be disposable.
📖 Related: Texas Internet Outage: Why Your Connection is Down and When It's Coming Back
Before leaving, the astronauts would often park the Rover a specific distance away from the Lunar Module. On Apollo 17, Gene Cernan parked the vehicle so its television camera could film the ascent stage blasting off. That iconic footage of the gold-clad ship shooting upward? A robot on a parked car filmed that.
The Current State of the Lunar Junk
So, what do they look like now?
Space is a harsh environment, but it’s also weirdly preservative. There is no wind on the moon. There is no rain. There is no oxygen to cause rust or oxidation. If you stood next to the Apollo 15 Rover today, the metal frame would likely look almost exactly as it did in 1971. The "United States" decals might be faded from intense UV radiation, but the structure would be intact.
However, the plastics and fabrics are a different story. The seats were made of nylon webbing. The fenders were fiberglass. Decades of unshielded solar radiation have likely made those materials incredibly brittle. If you tried to sit in the seat today, it would probably crumble into dust.
- Apollo 15 (Hadley-Apennine): The first Rover. It’s still parked at the base of the mountains.
- Apollo 16 (Descartes Highlands): This one had a fender break off. The astronauts famously fixed it with duct tape and a lunar map. That map is still taped to the Rover today.
- Apollo 17 (Taurus-Littrow): The last and most "advanced" use of the vehicle.
There is a common misconception that the moon is "pristine." It’s not. We’ve left tons of stuff there. Beyond the rovers, there are descent stages, lunar laser ranging retroreflectors, and even bags of human waste. The Apollo Lunar Rovers are just the most expensive pieces of litter in the solar system.
The Lessons for Future Mars Rovers
You can see the DNA of the Apollo rovers in the Mars Opportunity and Curiosity missions. The move toward redundant motors—each wheel on the Lunar Rover had its own 0.25 horsepower electric motor—is now standard for planetary exploration. If one motor dies, you have three others to drag you home.
👉 See also: Why the Star Trek Flip Phone Still Defines How We Think About Gadgets
The suspension system was also revolutionary. It used a double-wishbone design with dampers. It had to be folded up like a card table to fit inside the Lunar Module's storage bay, then "deployed" using a system of pulleys and lanyards. It’s a miracle it ever unfolded correctly.
What We Got Wrong
We didn't account for the dust.
Lunar dust, or regolith, isn't like Earth dust. It’s not soft. It’s jagged, like crushed glass, because there’s no weather to round off the edges of the particles. It’s also statically charged. It stuck to the Rovers' radiators, causing them to overheat. It got into the joints. On Apollo 17, a fender fell off, and the "rooster tail" of dust kicked up by the wheels coated the astronauts and the equipment. It was a nightmare. Future missions to the Moon or Mars are obsessed with "dust mitigation" specifically because of what we learned from those three Rovers.
Actionable Insights for Space Enthusiasts
If you want to track these vehicles or understand the legacy of the Apollo Lunar Rovers, you don't need a telescope (no Earth-based telescope is powerful enough to see them, by the way—that's a myth).
- Check the LRO Images: NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has flown low enough to photograph the Apollo landing sites. You can clearly see the Rovers as small dark specks, often with the "tracks" still visible in the dust nearby.
- Visit the Backups: Since NASA builds multiples of everything, you can see real Lunar Rovers on Earth. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has a test vehicle, and there are others at the Johnson Space Center and the Kennedy Space Center.
- Study the Schematics: The original Boeing technical manuals for the Rover are in the public domain. They are a masterclass in "form follows function" engineering.
- Support Heritage Legislation: There is an ongoing movement to declare the Apollo landing sites as "Lunar Heritage Sites" to protect the Apollo Lunar Rovers from future private missions that might try to "salvage" them for souvenirs.
The rovers aren't just trash. They are monuments. They represent the moment we stopped being a species that just looks at the sky and became a species that drives across it. They sit in total silence, waiting for the next set of tires to roll past them. Hopefully, they won't have to wait much longer.