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Shoot for the Moon

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Google “Great Moonbuggy Race” and you’ll turn up dozens of high-action video clips of college kids testing their ingenuity and stamina, furiously pedaling four-wheeled or sometimes three-wheeled contraptions around a twisting course full of bumps, dips and hairpin curves. Some reach the finish with relative ease, but more often riders get hung up on some snag midway through or fall victim to mechanical catastrophe. A few wind up prostrate on the ground alongside their overturned vehicles.

The Moonbuggy Race is a competition held every April at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and open to colleges, high schools and vocational schools around the globe. The rules are simple: Each team must design and build their own two-person buggy, powered by nothing more than human muscle, and race against the clock on a three-quarter-mile track. The course is meant to resemble the rugged surface of the moon, with man-made craters, sand traps, ridges, steep inclines, and here and there a spent rocket booster or an empty fuel tank, presumably as reminders of past Space Age glories. The event is a two-day geek fest, crowded with future engineers, and that’s by intention. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration sponsors the contest with the goal of sparking youngsters’ interest in science and technology. The thinking is that kids will see something fun and exciting on TV, and start cracking those algebra books in hope that someday they, too, will get to careen about on a simulation lunarscape.

This year, though, events took a different turn.

One clip, recorded by a NASA PR team, tells the story. Two students in bicycle helmets, clad in fashionable black, sit back-to-back aboard a reversed tricycle, one with the single wheel to the rear. They smile up at the video cam and the gloriously blue Alabama sky, eagerly awaiting their chance to prove themselves on the track. The pair are Cassandra Maurer and Eric Peloquin, seniors at Rhode Island School of Design. That’s right, RISD, the Providence art and design school, the alma mater of New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, director Gus Van Sant, “Family Guy” producer Seth MacFarlane, Talking Heads front man David Byrne, and not one single engineer.

A reporter from NASA public relations attempts a pre-race interview, but she seems at a loss for words. She talks about RISD being an art school, and then blurts out “They can build a pretty buggy, if nothing else.”

If she’d visited the campus in the preceding months, she might have checked her tongue. The RISD moonbuggy team, fifteen undergraduates majoring in industrial design, labored over their machine with monastic devotion, working fourteen- and eighteen-hour days in the final weeks before deadline, sweating over lathes and band saws and blue-flame acetylene torches in the school’s metals shop. They fashioned the frame from chromoly steel, a lightweight, high-strength alloy containing chromium and molybdenum. They shaped the carbon fiber seats in hand-built molds, with an eye toward ergonomic comfort, and then exposed them to low heat for a super-sexy sheen (one of the few aesthetic allowances). When construction was finished, the team tested their tricycle by riding up and down steps, which ceased to be barricades thanks to the Fox air shocks on all three wheels. No one works that hard for six academic credits and a few joy rides: They had created a masterpiece, and they were itching to show it to the world.

The reporter tosses out a question. “Why did you want to be in this race?”

Cassandra Maurer keeps smiling back from behind her reflective racing goggles. “We wanted to see,” she replies, “what we could do with an industrial design background, rather than an engineering background.”

Then it’s race time: Peloquin and Maurer are on the move, navigating a trail marked by hay bales and orange traffic cones. They climb hills, rattle over bumps, and jiggle their way across patches of crushed stone and gravel. Classmates run alongside the track, snapping pictures and shouting encouragement. All the while an off-screen announcer is rambling on about how the RISD squad has no engineering majors. “It’s an art and design school,” he says incredulously. “The entire team’s made up of industrial design students.”

But the buggy keeps moving, and his tone starts to change. “They’re bouncing over every obstacle so far,” he says. “This could be an upset.”

And so it is! Peloquin and Maurer barrel across the finish line in four minutes and twenty-seven seconds, a third-place finish in a race with more than seventy contestants. They also take the Rookie Award, for best showing by a first-time team.

The announcer offers some feeble jokes that make clear he sees this as an awesome achievement for anyone but the most hard-core techies. “Maybe NASA should see about hiring some Rhode Island School of Design graduates,” he says. His color man forces a chuckle. “Why not? It could work.”

The clip ends there. But it needs an addendum. Apparently no one told the Moonbuggy Race public relations folks that NASA is already hiring RISD grads. Three alumni work at the agency’s Houston headquarters, assigned to such projects as the Lunar Rover, and every year they’re joined by more than twenty undergraduate interns. Back on the campus, students regularly take on NASA-sponsored research projects, using their design expertise to help ensure astronauts will be comfortable in their journeys across the cosmos.

This is the brave new world of space exploration and it’s no longer the exclusive realm of scientists and engineers. Its first era was all about short trips and experiments and a get-there-first race between superpowers; everything was utilitarian and largely produced by technologists. But now it’s space stations and possibly human colonies on the moon or elsewhere, habitats that become a home away from home, where astronauts settle down for months at a time. Physical discomfort, psychological stress, boredom and sensory deprivation are now big concerns, and industrial design — which is all about adapting technology to the human condition — has become a vital part of manned space missions.

Evan Twyford, one of the RISD alums working at Houston, sums it up succinctly. “If the mission is very short, humans are willing to put up with a lot, but as missions become longer and longer, there’s a need for better design,” he says. “Good design means a happier, more productive crew, and that’s critical to mission success.”

Forget John Glenn’s cramped Mercury capsule. Think Captain Kirk’s Starship Enterprise, with its spacious windows, comfy chairs, and cool rec rooms. In the continuing quest to probe the Final Frontier, the creative mind has become a valued resource.


When RISD president John Maeda calls the school “the right-brain MIT,” it’s hardly a stretch. These days the campus is as much techie as artsy, a place where aspiring designers do their drafting with a mouse, exhibitions are installed on YouTube, and corporations like Intel and Toyota sponsor design research. Nonetheless, a campus visit can sometimes feel like a trip back in time, to the late 1800s, when the New England mill economy was still roaring and RISD was an infant institution. You’ll see freshmen busy in drawing classes, one of the Foundations courses that all first-year students are required to take. The architecture includes century-old, red-brick, factory-style workshops, with tall windows and lofty ceilings. One building, the Nature Lab, is crammed with human skeletons and musty taxidermied critters that are still used as studio models.