Imagine taking a walk on a handsome day, only to stumble upon the old, beat up hulk of a priceless lunar rover prototype rusting away in the back yard of a random home in Alabama.
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No one seems to know how the rover wound up in Alabama after NASA was done with it, but chances are, somebody at NASA made off with it or sold it for a little off-the-books cash. However, according to NASA’s documents, it was a Local Scientific Survey Module or LSSM that was used for “human factor studies and mobility evaluations” in 1965 and 1966. Although it hasn’t been confirmed, it might have been the prototype that Wernher von Braun is shown driving in a few images of tests at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Three of them are still on the moon, and one is at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
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Motherboard, in a fine piece of investigative journalism, turned up this footnote in NASA history with the help of a Freedom of Information Act request and several experts and historians. A U.S. Air Force Historian spotted the lunar rover in Blountsville, Alabama in a resident’s backyard, who ended up selling it. The historian told NASA about his discovery in February 2014, but it did not react fast enough. NASA apparently dragged its feet in recovering the rover, however: “By December, it had been destroyed”, the report continued. As for how it got out of NASA’s hands in the first place, that’s another mystery, although the agency notes that such prototype are “built in-house and are not always tagged”. However, an attorney quoted in their internal report said that prototypes in the early days of the Apollo program were poorly marked, and that it was not unusual for them to go missing.
