Cornell moonbuggy team is set for a rocky course

Seniors Troy Dunkelberger, in front, and Bill Park test their team's new moonbuggy in front of Rhodes Hall, April 3. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

By Adrianne Kroepsch '03

This weekend, April 12 and 13, the Cornell Moonbuggy Team will launch a return voyage to the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., for the ninth annual Great Moonbuggy Race. This will be the third time that Cornell has entered the competition, and just like a return trip to the moon, this year's mission, it's hoped, will be guided to success by the wisdom of past experience.

The event, inspired by the development of the first lunar roving vehicle (LRV), taken to the moon aboard Apollo 15 in 1971, challenges college and high school teams to design, build and race a moonbuggy over simulated lunar terrain. Each human-powered buggy carries two students, one male and one female (including this writer, a member of the Cornell cycling team), over a half-mile course strewn with lunar-like soil, rocks, craters, inclines and lava ridges. To navigate these obstacles, the students must solve engineering problems similar to those faced by the developers of the original LRV, including dimension and assembly requirements.

Six of this year's 12 team members are second-semester seniors, who spend almost every minute of their free time working on the buggy at the Emerson Product Realization Facility in Rhodes Hall. "At this point in the building process, the moonbuggy is a very large time commitment. I would estimate about 30 to 50 hours a week in the shop for some of the team," said Troy Dunkelberger '02, mechanical engineering (ME), the team's testing specialist.

The team has come a long way since 2000, when it first entered the competition with a budget of $1,000 and a buggy made from used bicycle parts. This year's budget is $12,000, and the team is sponsored, in part, by corporate funding from Ford Motor Co. and United Technologies. Cornell also will be entering two buggies in the competition, one a revamped version of the buggy that finished fourth in last year's race, and the other a new and improved spin-off of the 2001 model.

Both moonbuggies are human-powered, four-wheel-drive vehicles on mountain-bike wheels that carry two in-line, seated riders. For the first time, this year's moonbuggy was completely finished a week before the race. "We were much more rushed at this time last year, and we had to sacrifice some design characteristics to get the buggy rolling," Dunkelberger said.

"The main point of this year was to take last year's design and improve it," said team leader Bill Park '02, ME. "We made small improvements everywhere. Everything was recalculated and fine-tuned to make this year's moonbuggy what last year's could have been."

According to Noah Smick '02, ME, the team's suspension leader, "The most striking difference in the 2002 buggy is that the riders sit back-to-back instead of facing forward as in previous years." This new configuration will center the weight on the moonbuggy, making it more stable. The buggy also will be more compact and versatile, with the rider's feet extending beyond the wheel base of the buggy, making a good fit possible for different-sized people.

The Great Moonbuggy Race involves two components, an assembly time and a race time. According to Christopher Boitnott '02, ME, drivetrain and welding specialist, "The biggest thing that went wrong last year was assembly." The team's assembly time was nearly a minute, while the race only lasted between 4 and 5 minutes, he explained.

This year, said Boitnott, "our new assembly time will be under 5 seconds. By getting it under 10 seconds, we will be in contention for first place."

The combination of hard work and fun is what makes the moonbuggy so appealing to this group of engineers. The hands-on experience of working with materials and being part of a design process makes the project a truly unusual learning experience. Said Dunkelberger, "This fall we set out to make a first-place buggy and ended up making a first-place team."