Engineering team is educated at NASA's moonbuggy contest

Three of Cornell's moonbuggy team members, from left, Brett Lee '02, Brad Crowley '02 and George Barton '02 pose on campus with their vehicle. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

By Bill Steele

A team of Cornell sophomore engineering students, an Ithaca College student and one local high school student learned what it's like to design equipment for use on moon-like landscapes by building an entry for the seventh annual NASA Moonbuggy competition April 8 at the Rocket and Space Center in Huntsville, Ala.

It was the first time a Cornell team had entered the competition, and they learned a lot about Murphy's Law. Up against schools that had been entering for four or five years in a row and had spent over a year building their latest buggies, the Cornell team didn't come back with any prizes, but said team leader Brett Lee '02, "When we left, the feeling was not one of 'Wow, we got killed,' but 'Wow, we're going to kick so much butt next year!'"

First-place honors, consisting of a plaque and a set of fleece jackets with the Moonbuggy race logo, went to a team from the College of New Jersey in Ewing.

The Cornell team did get respect for the originality of its design. "Because we had no preconceptions of how moonbuggies were 'supposed' to be designed, we showed up with a lot of ideas that none of the other teams were using, and they were quite impressed," Lee said. "We were the definitive underdogs of the competition and had a large cheering section when we started our race, even though we only brought four people with us."

The goal of the competition is to design, build and operate a two-passenger, human-powered vehicle that meets some of the design constraints of the original Lunar rover that was used on the Moon by Apollo astronauts. Twenty-seven teams of high school and college students competed this year in separate categories.

In addition to Lee, Cornell's team included Brad Crowley, Vince Luh, Rob Shydo, George Barton, Jon Caputo, Amy Comer and Chris Boitnott, all sophomores in the Sibley School of Mechanical Engineering, Matt Siegle, a student at Ithaca College, and Emily Dean, a junior at Lansing High School. Dean was also part of a team of Lansing High students who helped to test Cornell's Mars Rover last year.

"We started with something very two-dimensional, very planar," Lee said in describing the team's design, "but then we went to a lot of triangles and trusses. Trusses let you make everything stronger, with thinner tubing and lighter, but so much stronger. And it just looks cool, too, like a stealth bomber." (Trusses are structures that replace a solid component with an open framework with triangular bracing.)

To meet the design requirements, a vehicle must collapse into a space no larger than 4-by-4-by-4 feet, just as the original moonbuggy did to travel on the Apollo spacecraft. The Cornell team met this requirement by building what amounts to two one-person vehicles, then joining them with a steering mechanism. To disassemble it they separate the two halves and stack one inside the other.

In the competition, two students, one male and one female, must carry the collapsed vehicle 20 feet, then assemble it, working against the clock. After a safety check by officials, they race the vehicle over a half-mile course of rough "lunar" terrain dotted with rocks and other obstacles similar to those found on the Moon.

The big flaw the Cornell team discovered on arrival at the race was that their design was not nearly sturdy enough for the formidable course. "We grossly underestimated the difficulty of the course," Lee said. "These obstacles were monstrous. The majority of them were constructed by taking old tires and two by fours, strewing them across the path and then covering it all with crushed cement." Between that and some design problems, the buggy never completed the entire course.

"I was very impressed," said Andy Ruina, professor of theoretical and applied mechanics, who advised the team. "They pulled together a team starting this spring, they barely got a budget, they got no course credit, they only had a few people and had full course schedules. It was impressive that they got anything together at all, and I think the thing they made was cool. It was basically a good design, and with some modifications it could be very good."

So that's not the end of the story. The students had a meeting recently to talk about changes for next year. "I'm going to be here over the summer, and quite frankly," Lee said, "I can't think of anything cooler to do on weekends than build a moonbuggy."

There's more information about the moonbuggy competition at http://moonbuggy.msfc.nasa.gov/. A NASA press release on the difficulties of designing the original Lunar rover is at http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast10apr_1m.htm.