University of Virginia Library

BOOKS

Memory Of A Mondauto

by LAWRENCE WHITE

(Mr. White is a first year student in
the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences. –Ed.)

These summer book reviews
will differ from most, in that
we plan to devote it to past
books; that is, to works which
we feel received too little
notice when first released, or
which make especially good
reading or rereading today.

After watching the Apollo
astronauts gad about the
moon's surface in their lunar
rovers, we repaired to the
library and looked up a little
curiosity of 1959: the late Dr.
Hermann Oberth's proposal for
a lunar surface vehicle.

We suppose a discussion of
Oberth's moon car should start
with a few lines about Oberth
himself, who turns out to be
almost the archetype of the
prewar German scientist. A tall
man with a neat mustache and
a faint likeness to Albert
Einstein, Oberth was born in
Transylvania and educated in
Germany. Sarajevo and the
Great War interrupted his
schooling, but after the
armistice he resumed his
studies.

Oberth was Wernher von
Braun's mentor during the
prewar years; indeed, it was
one of Oberth's books which
steered the young von Braun
into rocket engineering. During
the war Oberth worked with
von Braun on the V-2 project
at Peenemunde.

After he and most of the
other V-2 scientists
surrendered to the Americans
in 1945, Oberth spent some
time in an internment camp,
and upon his release returned
to Europe to continue his
research.

From 1955 to 1958, Oberth
again collaborated with von
Fraun, this time on American
missile projects at Alabama's
Redstone Arsenal. Oberth
returned to Germany in 1958,
and died shortly thereafter.

The Moon Car was one of
Oberth's last books, a model of
technical writing and, in light
of how little we really knew
about the moon's surface
before the first soft-landers

touched down in the Sixties, a
quite accurate surmise about
the conditions a lunar rover
would face on the moon.

The Oberth moon car looks
quaint today, only fourteen
years after the design was
published; indeed, it resembles
nothing as much as a huge
brandy snifter, or a Jefferson
cup atop a pogo stick.

But with a few
modifications, the bizarre
contraption could still make a
decent lunar rover, and if we
ever have moon bases which
require the services of such a
vehicle, it may look something
like the good Doctor's
Mondauto.

The apparition which
Oberth proposed stood some
fifty feet tall and looked like a
rococo wine goblet. The lower
half of a spherical pressurized
cabin, much like a deep-sea
diving bell, protruded from the
bottom of the "bowl," which
also housed a large gyroscope
to keep the car stable.

Atop the "bowl" were solar
mirrors for power, radiators to
bleed off excess heat from the
cabin, and a crane for doing
odd jobs on the moon.

The "stem" of the "goblet"
was a telescoping cylinder
which terminated in a set of
caterpillar treads for
locomotion. By releasing
compressed gas into the
cylinder's piston mechanism,
the driver could make the car
hop over obstacles in its path –
crevasses, say, or steep hills.

Half the fun of reading The
Moon Car (and in Willy Ley's
good translation, it makes
livelier reading than you might
expect) is seeing how Oberth
anticipated hundreds of
problems involved in operating
a lunar rover.

For example, how do you
lubricate bearings which must
be exposed to the vacuum
outside the cabin? Most liquids
boil away in airless space.
Solution: use graphite, or
silicones, or some liquid with a
very low vapor pressure.

What about – ahem – waste
disposal? Simple, saith the
worthy Doctor. Let the toilet
open to both the inside and
outside of the cabin, with an
airtight hatch on each side.
After performing your chore,
shut the inner lid and open the
outer one: air will rush out of
the chamber, carrying the
detritus away with it, to
trouble you no more. Ach, die
Wissenschaft!

After rereading this book,
we regret there was no place in
the Apollo program for Dr.
Oberth's creation. It would
have looked charming,
standing like some great
crinoid lily on a lunar plain.
What a Newsweek cover that
would have made!