Space Race

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Gene was cruising. He couldn't believe how easy this was. By this point, he was way ahead of Harry with only 6k to go. Their 20k race would easily be his. He'd been going at a comfortable 13km/h for the last 64 minutes, so another 28 minutes would do it.

Then the impossible happened. The electric motor cut out. "What's happening?" asked Gene, though there was nobody who could possibly provide an answer. "How could this be?" He jumped out of the driver's seat and took a look at the battery. There weren't any visible problems. He pressed a button that tested the power level and the reading was 5%. "Not enough to drive anywhere, just enough to run the emergency systems", he thought.

He yelled, "Shit!" Then, smiling to himself, he said, "I'm very likely the first person to ever curse on the Moon. Sweet."

Gene returned to the task at hand. He did some mental arithmetic. The rover had a weight of two-hundred and ten kilograms times an atmosphere 1/6 as powerful as the one on Earth is 35 kg. "I can carry this back to the Lunar Module and still win the race," he said. He lifted it from behind and the rover seemed to elevate rather easily. He soon held the weight of the rover above his head. "A bit harder than carrying a bicycle on Earth," he remarked to himself.

He took a step forward and bounced a meter off the surface. Three seconds passed, then it was time to bounce again. "It's like running in slow motion," he said to himself. Gene laughed to himself, "This is awesome". For the next 45 minutes he bounced towards the finish line with the rover held proudly overhead.

At the peak of one of his bounces during the 110th minute, he saw the Lunar Module less than a kilometer away. The race would soon be over. But then he saw Harry coming up behind him. Harry was bouncing along but there was no sign of his rover, which made sense to Gene because he had sabotaged the axel to snap after a few kilometers. Harry, however, had figured out a technique so he could get more distance with each step. "He's gaining on me!" panicked Gene. He tried to drop the rover gently to the ground, but the rear fender dug into the lunar regolith. There was a massive crack. The fender separated from the main assembly and bounced another three meters away. "That's okay," said Gene as he kicked his bouncing into high gear. The finish line was only 900 meters away.

Gene bounced while Harry seemed to leap towards the finish line. With 100 meter left, Gene was finally overtaken and knew it was over. Harry bounded towards the Lunar Module and 15 seconds later the race was over.

Afterwards, as the dust settled, they talked about their great space race.

"I helped my cause a little," admitted Harry.

"How's that?"

"I ran a few kilometers of power off the motor before the start of the race. If you had it with a full motor, you would've won for sure."

"You dirty cheat!" Gene laughed. "Though I suppose you wouldn't be too surprised if I asked how long your axel held up?"

Harry laughed harder, "You knew about that? I got halfway before it finally broke. You know, you should have seen yourself carrying that thing above your head. Hilarious."

"And no thanks to you we still have one working rover to buzz around in," said Gene. "Hey, I've got another idea."

"What's that?"

"Double or nothing for the person who can hit a golf ball the farthest."

"You're on!"

Original photograph from NASA: Astronaut Eugene A. Cernan, Apollo 17 mission commander, makes a short checkout of the Lunar Roving Vehicle during the early part of the first Apollo 17 extravehicular activity (EVA-1) at the Taurus-Littrow landing site. This view of the "stripped down" Rover is prior to loadup. This photograph was taken by Geologist-Astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, Lunar Module pilot. The mountain in the right background is the East end of South Massif.

Data used in the story (speed/weight of LRV) from this Wikipedia page about the Lunar Rover.

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