Moonbuggy team races to a 3rd place finish in NASA competition
Shaving exactly 30 seconds off of last year’s time, Ohio State’s moonbuggy race team peddled to a third-place finish April 1-2 in the college division of NASA’s 18th annual Great Moonbuggy Race. Last year’s team finished fourth in the competition, which is held at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.
The race challenges competitors to maneuver their two-person moonbuggies through a half-mile, simulated lunar terrain course peppered with craters, rocks, lava ridges and lunar-like soil. More than 70 teams from 22 states, Puerto Rico, Canada, Germany, India and Russia took part in this year's race.
Ohio State’s buggy, powered and navigated by welding engineering students Kristen Hammer and Isaac Kennedy, clocked a time of 4:33 (four minutes, thirty-three seconds), finishing just behind the University of Alabama-Huntsville (4:19). The University of Puerto Rico Humacao took first place with a time of 3:41.
Nicknamed the "Frankenstein bike," Ohio State's 185-pound moonbuggy was designed and built by Hammer, Kennedy and four other welding engineering students who welded together two bicycle chassis with high-carbon steel.Each team must have one female and one male driver, and the buggy must collapse into a four-foot cube that the two drivers can carry 20 feet.
The other four team members are Erik Birkinbine, Brian Love, Dorian Matthews and Jared Proegler. MSE associate professor Suresh Babu served as the team’s advisor.
Building the moonbuggy presented them with many of the same engineering challenges that developers of the Apollo-era lunar rovers faced at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in the late 1960s. This year’s race commemorated the 40th anniversary of the first lunar rover on the moon by NASA astronauts David Scott and Jim Irwin in 1971.
Participation in the race has increased annually from just eight college teams in 1994—a high school division was added two years later—to this year's record-breaking numbers.
Both the Columbus Dispatch and the Lantern ran features on this year’s Ohio State team.
