Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings

Earl Swift, already acclaimed for his best seller,Chesapeake Requiem, spins this long-overdue narrative about the most expensive automobile ever built. With a price tag of approximately twelve million dollars each, the manufacturer only built three. Designed in large part by German immigrants, this car topped out at eleven miles per hour, climbed some of the steepest slopes in the world, and traveled across an unearthly landscape. Dubbed by the media as the Moon Buggy, the lunar rover almost didn’t get built.

More than half of the book is dedicated to the rover’s inception and its’ evolution of design and includes the two companies-Boeing and General Motors-that joined forces to win the bidding of the contract. Swift offers up exhausting mini-biographies of a host of people that worked on the project along with the frustrations they encountered.

The speed of the narrative leaps into action once the story gets us to the moon with many previously unpublished photographs included. Swift details the rover’s amazing performance and the lunar expeditions that would have been impossible without it. This is one book every car enthusiast should read.