Astronauts Fixed Their Moon Rover With Duct Tape

Two men were driving a car on the Moon, and it needed a fender repaired. NASA did not have a tow truck. It did not have a spare parts store. What it had was a roll of tape, a stack of paper maps, and a room full of engineers awake in the middle of the night in Houston.

An Accidental Hit With a Hammer

Apollo 17 landed in the Taurus-Littrow valley on December 11, 1972, the last crewed mission to the Moon. During the first moonwalk, commander Gene Cernan was working near the parked lunar rover when a geology hammer stowed in a pocket of his spacesuit caught the edge of the right-rear fender extension. It snapped clean off.

The fender mattered more than it sounds. In the Moon's low gravity and airless vacuum, dirt kicked up by the rover's wire-mesh wheels does not simply fall back down. It sprays out in long "rooster tails," as Cernan and lunar module pilot Harrison "Jack" Schmitt called them, coating everything in fine, abrasive grit. Without the fender, dust began covering the astronauts' suits and the rover's instruments, and it was making the batteries run dangerously hot.

The Overnight Engineering Session

Cernan tried a quick fix with duct tape carried on the rover, but lunar dust kept the tape from holding, and it tore loose again during the drive back to the lunar module. Riding without the fender was ruled out entirely.

So while Cernan and Schmitt slept, flight controllers in Houston got to work. Astronaut John Young, on the backup crew, worked with the team to design a replacement fender the astronauts could actually build using only what was already on board their spacecraft.

Four Maps, Some Clamps, and a Roll of Tape

Early in the second moonwalk, Cernan and Schmitt built it. They took four stiff, laminated lunar maps they no longer needed, taped them together into a curved panel with what Cernan later called "good old-fashioned American gray tape," and clamped the whole thing onto the fender mount using clips borrowed from the lunar module's optical alignment telescope lamp.

It Actually Worked

NASA photo AS17-137-20979, taken that same day, shows Schmitt seated in the rover with the taped-together map fender bolted in place. The repair held for the rest of the mission, through the second and third moonwalks, as the astronauts covered roughly 22 miles of driving across the lunar surface. Back on Earth, the president of the Auto Body Association of America was reportedly so impressed that he made Cernan and Schmitt lifetime honorary members before they had even left lunar orbit.

Still on Display

The four maps that made up the improvised fender came home with the crew. NASA transferred them to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in the mid-1970s, where the repaired panel is still preserved today as one of the more unlikely artifacts of the entire Apollo program.