posted 02-15-2024 01:08 PM               

From cS member David Clow in a 2015 article for RocketSTEM:

"I came up with this idea of folding the vehicle," he said, "but nobody could really visualize it. That's why I built a little 1/6 scale model and with that, people could see it. Some of the pieces that needed machining we did in the shop at GM, but I made most of it and assembled it here at home. [For the wheels] I bought some stainless steel mesh off the shelf and cut it to the right size, rolled it into a cylinder and then knitted the ends into a torus shape.

"The 1/6 scale was perfect for the passenger, an Astronaut G.I. Joe with a silver Mercury-type space suit that I borrowed from my son. My wife and I made an Apollo backpack. She helped to sew the folding seats. The instrument panel and the steering joystick, the wire wheels with the titanium bumpers, the folding seats, the way the front and rear sections folded up and the wheels tucked in; it was all accurate, all to scale. And it was radio-controlled, so you could unfold it, sit G. I. Joe in the seat, and drive it on the floor.

"GM knew I was doing it," he continued, "but NASA was out of the loop. We were trying to sell the idea: look NASA, it's possible to do this! We went to NASA headquarters, to Houston, and to Huntsville, and gave presentations demonstrating the model. We made a scale model of the space in which it had to fold, and showed how it worked.

"In Huntsville, we pitched the engineering group. One of them, Len Bradford, led the way to von Braun's office and he opened von Braun's door. Instead of going in, I put the model Rover on the floor. von Braun was on the phone and the model drove in over his rug. He hung up and said, 'What the heck is this?' We gave him the presentation of how it worked, how it folded. The week after, he called in [NASA Project Manager] Sonny Morea, and Morea became the program manager to develop the [Rover].

"NASA issued another Request for Proposals. GM bid against Bendix for the job; it was pro forma really, because our folding and packaging design couldn't be duplicated. We got the contract and we and Sonny Morea had just 17 months to deliver the Rover."