UE Moon Buggy Takes Third at National NASA Competition
April 12, 2005

One of the University’s team of engineering students competing in the National Great Moonbuggy Race at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center raced to third place this weekend – the best finish ever for a UE team in the 12 years UE has competed.

The team is comprised of seniors Eric Roberson and Aaron Glover; juniors Alan Wilber and Jon Christenberry; sophomores Steven Burch, Lance Hawkins and Darren Wilcher, and freshmen James McDaniel and Emily Herr. Riders in the competition were Roberson and non-engineer Natalie Gilbert on one team; and Hawkins and Herr on the other team.

The UE Moonbuggy Teams were in competition with 28 other college teams from 14 states, Germany and Puerto Rico. The winning team, Utah State University in Logan, Utah, won the race with a time of 3 minutes, 59 seconds. Placing second was Pittsburgh State University, from Pittsburg, Kansas with a time of 4 minutes, 42 seconds. UE came in third, just eight seconds behind at 4 minutes, 50 seconds.

The event is inspired by the actual lunar roving vehicle project, which was successfully completed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville during the 1960s-70s. The engineers had the challenge to design and build a compact, light, flexible and durable vehicle that would carry astronauts on the Moon’s surface during the Apollo missions.

The Moonbuggy Race is the culmination of a competition that challenges students to design and build a human-powered vehicle, so they will learn how to deal with real-world engineering problems.