A Car for the Ages: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings - A Conversation with Earl Swift

While everyone has their own personal list, we could all maybe agree on some of the most iconic cars ever made. The VW Beetle, the 1968 Ford Mustang, the 1960 Corvette, the 57 Chevy, the Porsche 911, The 1955 Mercedes gull-wing, the DeLorean, and just for good measure, the 1963 Aston Martin.

But equally important is a vehicle that gets little attention, All of its models together only traveled under 100 miles. When it was built it was over budget, over schedule, and was only a two-seater. It was the lunar rover vehicle that was a part of Apollo 15, 16, and 17. Without it, we’d know a lot less about the moon, about our own planet, and even the solar system. Not bad for a car that was bare bones and electrified, long before Elon Musk was born.

That’s the story that Earl Swift tell in his new book Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings. 

 My conversation with Earl Swift

Where could this car take you?

Think about advertising for new cars. Better yet, think about looking at a new car in the showroom. That experience is all about possibilities and dreams. It’s about what that car can do for you, not just where it will take you geographically, but where it will take you emotionally.

From the days of Mad Men, right up to today, that’s what the car dream has always been about. But usually, like the real disconnect between dreams and life, the car takes on a life of its own. It's often far removed from the ad or the showroom fantasy.

Few cars have conjured up this iconography more than the 1957 Chevy. A car that personified our relationship to the automobile and the infinite possibilities that were postwar America. That's the world that Earl Swift captures in Auto Biography: A Classic Car, an Outlaw Motorhead, and 57 Years of the American Dream.

My conversation with Earl Swift:

This is real infrastructure improvement

Joan Didion once referred to the freeways as the only secular communion that what we have. Certainly the freeway, more specifically our Interstate Highway System, is the concrete fabric that may be the only thing holding our nation together. But how did this system, the largest public works project in history, ever get done? Certainly, it could never be accomplished today!

Today, when we pay lip service to improving our infrastructure, and then doing nothing about, its a particularly good time to go back and look at the creation of that Interstate Highway System and the vision and courage it took to get it done. Journalist and author Earl Swift explains it all in The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.

My conversation with Earl Swift:

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