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Handling the moon buggy is relatively simple. To begin moving and accelerate, the driver presses forward a short, airplane-like joy stick. For turns, he simply shoves the stick sideways in the appropriate direction. The movement of the wheels themselves is not so simple; pushing the stick to the left, for instance, swings the front wheels left and the rear wheels right, thereby enabling the rover to make a much sharper left turn than an ordinary car. To stop, the astronaut pulls all the way back.
Bump Car. Though the astronauts have spent hours practicing with an earthly prototype, Scott insists that the vehicle can easily be mastered after a trial run of only four or five minutes. Perhaps, but because of power limitations in the motor-driven steering mechanism, it can take as long as six seconds to send steering commands to the wheels. As a result, the vehicle responds as slowly as a carnival bump car. "That can make driving the rover hairy," reports TIME Correspondent John Wilhelm, who recently took a short spin in a terrestrial version at Cape Kennedy. "Cutting some figure eights between NASA's simulated sand craters, we nearly ran down a television camera crew."
No TV men will be in the way on the moon. But there will be a special RCA color video camera perched on the rover's front. The camera's movements will be controlled from earth, thus allowing officials in Houston and TV viewers everywhere to follow the astronauts' activities on the moon. The camera will also be positioned to send back the first live pictures of a lift-off from the moon. One thing that will not be sent back is the rover itself. It will be left behind, along with the other expensive technological debris already scattered by man on the moon.
While all eyes were on the impending U.S. moon mission, the Soviets last week gave their first official explanation of Soyuz ll's tragic end. Confirming the speculation of U.S. space officials, they said that the deaths of the three cosmonauts were caused by a sudden drop in cabin pressure—and not by the aftereffects of prolonged weightlessness. The cosmonauts were not wearing pressure suits for the re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. Thus the loss of oxygen quickly rendered them unconscious and brought a rapid, painless death. The Russians attributed the depressurization to a "loss of the ship's sealing," but indicated that they still had not determined whether this was the result of an oversight by the cosmonauts when they closed the spacecraft's hatch or a more basic flaw in the machine.
In the light of the Russian tragedy,
U.S. space officials have decided to take at least one extra precaution during the forthcoming lunar mission. The Apollo 15 crew have now been ordered to keep their suits on for a longer period through one phase of the mission: from the docking operation with the command module right through the jettisoning of the lunar module. NASA also is considering whether to reinstitute the practice of having crews wear their suits during re-entry to earth. The practice was dropped after the voyage of Apollo 7 in 1968; it was considered a needless precaution.