Suggested Searches

3 min read

Students Ready to Keep Wheels Turning at NASA Great Moonbuggy Race April 26-27; Teams Are Now Available for Pre-Race Interviews

What: More than 90 student teams are ready to keep the wheels turning at the 20th annual NASA Great Moonbuggy Race. Set for April 26-27 at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., the race will include teams from more than 30 major media markets. Team representatives are available for interviews about their hard work and preparation for the event.
More than 600 high school, college and university students, representing 23 states and Puerto Rico, Canada, India, Germany, Mexico and Russia, are expected to participate in this year’s race, navigating their innovative, two-person buggies around a half-mile-long course that simulates the craggy surface of the moon. NASA will stream the entire two-day event, including the closing awards ceremony, live via UStream:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-msfc

Follow the event live on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/moonbuggyrace) April 26-27. NASA will “Tweet” updates throughout the race, including preliminary course times for each team and all award winners.
NASA and the U.S. Space & Rocket Center will host a three-day event for 50 of its social media followers beginning the evening of April 25 and continuing all day April 26-27 during the moonbuggy race. This is the first NASA Social to be held at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Social participants are encouraged to use their favorite social media outlet to provide race updates to their followers. Users on all social networks are encouraged to use the hashtags #NASASocial and #moonbuggy. More information about this NASA Social can be found here.
The NASA Great Moonbuggy Race began in 1994, inspired by the original lunar rovers developed for the Apollo moon missions in the 1970s. The race is organized by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, and is intended to inspire and engage new generations of engineers and explorers.
Major corporate sponsors for the race are Lockheed Martin Corporation, The Boeing Company, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Aerojet and Jacobs Engineering ESTS Group, all with operations in Huntsville. A complete list of contributors is available on the moonbuggy site.
Who: A complete list of participating teams is available. For contact information, or to learn more about the race, contact Angela Storey at the Marshall Center at (256) 544-0034.
When: Teams arrive in Huntsville April 25 for registration. They race April 26-27 from approximately 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. CDT. The weekend concludes with an awards ceremony at 5 p.m. CDT April 27.
For more event details, race rules, information on the course, contributors and photos from previous competitions, visit:
 

http://moonbuggy.msfc.nasa.gov

To read a feature about 20 years of “keeping the wheels turning” at the NASA Great Moonbuggy Race, visit:
 

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/2013/13-031.html

For more information about NASA education programs, visit:
 

https://www.nasa.gov/education
 
 

– end –

text-only version of this release

Angela Storey
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
256-541-7698
angela.d.storey@nasa.gov