Month: December 2022

Enlarge / Eugene Cernan is seen inside the Lunar Module after a long day's work on the lunar surface. (credit: Andy Saunders/Apollo Remastered)

Shortly after midnight, 50 years ago this morning, the Apollo 17 mission lifted off from Florida. With Gene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ron Evans on board, this was NASA's sixth and final spaceflight to the lunar surface.

Cernan and Schmitt spent three days on the Moon, setting records for the longest distance traversed in their rover—7.6 km—and the amount of lunar rocks returned. But today, what the mission is perhaps most remembered for is the fact that it was the last time humans landed on the Moon—or even went beyond low Earth orbit.

Memorably, before he boarded the Lunar Module to blast off from the Moon's surface, Cernan radioed back to Mission Control on Earth. People, he said, would return to the Moon "not too long into the future." Speaking to him much later in life, it was clear from Cernan's frustrations that he did not mean decades into the future.

Enlarge / The Squad Solar City Car is a low-speed vehicle that uses the power of the Sun to charge its batteries. (credit: Squad Mobility)

It's that time of year when the CES email spam goes into overdrive. I won't be on the ground in Las Vegas in 2023 for the gigantic consumer tech trade show, but one pitch almost—well, ok, partly—makes me regret that, because it seems like an interesting idea. It's a new city car from a Dutch company called Squad Mobility; a relatively ungainly thing if I'm honest, but one that suggests a tantalizing solution to the problem of city-dwellers needing EVs but not having anywhere to charge them.

That's because the Squad solar city car, as its name suggests, uses the power of the sun to recharge its battery. Now, this is not a new idea; solar-powered cars have raced, albeit at quite low speeds, for many years now. Ars even rode in one, in Manhattan of all places.

But there's always a trade-off. Those solar-powered racers are ultralight-weight creations, built with as little drag as possible. As day-to-day transport they would make even a vintage-car owner wince at the lack of creature comforts.