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Bill Tinnin

Moon Rover Continues to Gain Traction

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Inventor Bill Tinnin has global fan base; GROVER to be featured at Star Party.

While Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s footsteps have been imprinted on the moon and in world history, the Moon Buggy they explored in left tracks on the lunar surface and also in the imaginations of the news media and fans. At 88, the Northern Arizona man who played a role in designing the buggy prototype continues to be tracked down by the news media and fans. GROVER, or Geology Rover, spends its days in retirement in the U.S. Geological Survey building in Flagstaff. Bill Tinnin, the inventor credited with inventing the moon buggy, is retired in Prescott Valley. The two have been connected since the 1960s Apollo moon missions.

Since the first moon landing on July 20, 1969, Tinnin has been contacted by people from 12 states and nine countries for his contributions to the NASA space program. He was never featured in international TV and press the way the first astronauts were, but GROVER was.

Tinnin credits a story published three years ago in the Flagstaff Business News (FBN) and Quad Cities Business News (QCBN) with creating public awareness, especially in Central and Northern Arizona. “I had hundreds of people from just Arizona contact me. Some come visit me. They want to hear even more.”

The really big exposure happened when a television team from the Netherlands visited Flagstaff in June 2019 and read the FBN article. They contacted him at his Prescott Valley home, arranged to film a video and posted that video on YouTube. Shortly thereafter, Tinnin began receiving messages from viewers from around the world. He now has fans from coast to coast and border to border – Massachusetts to Washington and Oregon, and Texas to Wisconsin, and many states between.

International contacts range from the one with the Dutch in 2019 to a more recent one this fall with the Czech Republic. An especially intriguing handwritten letter was from a youngster, Sue Jennings, from Victoria, Australia, who said in part: “What an exciting life you led. You must be very clever to be involved in all the ground-breaking activities you have. Will you please autograph the enclosed photo and return it to me?”

Foreign contacts range from throughout Europe and the United Kingdom to Canada and the South Pacific.

For instance, Bill and his wife, Pam, encountered a British couple while on a vacation in Alaska in 2011. They have remained in regular contact since. The couple did some research about Tinnin and his connection to NASA and the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) where Tinnin worked for decades. The Brits, both teachers and cinematographers, made a video focusing on Bill and Grover and shared it with organizations and groups and put it on travel blogs. That stimulated even more contacts from around the world. The couple visited and stayed with the Tinnins in April.

To be clear, Tinnin did not build the actual vehicles that roved the moon. He built the prototype that astronauts trained in from a wrecked truck and auto parts he scrounged from Flagstaff junkyards. He replaced the original wheels with four battery-driven electric wheels. He stripped an old umbrella frame, turned it inside out and used it as the antenna to send and receive radio signals from the spaceship and Earth.

Asked if he could build a lunar rover, Tinnin said, “Sure, why not?” At that time he was working at the USGS where he began work as a mechanic after being honorably discharged from the U.S. Air Force. Tinnin credits Eugene Shoemaker, a distinguished USGS geologist, with having the vision to realize astronauts would need more than foot power to roam a moonscape pockmarked by eons of space debris impacts. Shoemaker also realized the terrain around Flagstaff, with its many craters, lava flows and craggy ravines, would be an ideal location to train astronauts.

Shoemaker and fellow geologists, including the late Gordon Swann, dedicated years of their careers to train and educate astronauts about what they likely would encounter on the moon’s surface. Tinnin traveled with Swann to diverse terrains throughout Arizona and Nevada to train astronauts in GROVER.

“I was one of the lucky ones,” Tinnin said. “I worked with every astronaut who walked on the moon. I have a framed wall display with mission patches and images given to me from every Apollo mission and I’m very proud of it. I’m proud of our team that made it happen – Rutledge ‘Putty’ Mills, Dick Wiser and Walt Fahey.”

The cost for Tinnin’s version of the Moon Buggy was about $2,000. NASA’s version cost $20,000, he said. “And when the ones used on the moon were built by Boeing, it cost more than $1 million.”

Tinnin says he doesn’t have much contact now with the early astronauts and other NASA and USGS personnel. “Many of them are gone now. After all, it has been more than 50 years. But I have my memories, and I have people who still want to learn more. What else could I ask for?”

Tinnin’s achievements are documented in several publications, including “Lunar and Planetary Rovers,” by Anthony Young and “Northern Arizona Space Training,” by Kevin Schindler and William Sheehan. He is cited in dozens of USGS publications.

Guided tours to visit GROVER and other USGS space exploration tools will be offered by the USGS at the free Flagstaff Star Party Field Day, 3-5 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 22, at Buffalo Park.

A SPECIAL MEMORY

Being near CBS newsman Walter Cronkite when he said those now indelible words, “Man is on the Moon.”

A MAJOR CHALLENGE

Building something from scratch for an outer space exploration that had never before been attempted. Our technology then was very primitive.

HOW I DECOMPRESS

Listening to a lot of country music.

GREATEST SOURCE OF PRIDE

All 20 astronauts who were sent to the Moon used the vehicles we built to train on the crater fields that surround Flagstaff.

REALITY HIT

When some of those astronauts returned to Flagstaff and shook our hands. We knew it [driving on the moon] had really happened. QCBN

By Ray Newton, QCBN

Footsteps and Tire Tracks – On the Moon? 

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Calling it “…the biggest challenge I ever had was when I was asked if we could build a Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) to be used by astronauts,” Bill Tinnin and his colleagues said, ”Sure, why not?” At the time, he was a mechanic at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) office in Flagstaff 

That was 62 years ago. It was a small piece of the now world-famous Project Apollo that put the first man on the moon.  

It all started when then-President John F. Kennedy told Congress in May 1960 that the U.S. should commit itself to “…landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” That started the Apollo missions, which lasted from 1960 to 1973.  

Nine years later, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered those now famous words, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” on June 20, 1969. 

Armstrong did not realize, of course, that he was indirectly praising a hardcore team of scientists, geologists, astrophysicists and “in the trenches” staff at the Flagstaff USGS. They collaborated and cooperated with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) personnel to make Apollo the pride of space exploration. 

A little known but key player among the 411,000 across the nation who worked for NASA and its contractors who made moon exploration possible – Tinnin. 

Tinnin, now in his 80s, retired in Prescott Valley after a lengthy and distinguished career with USGS in Flagstaff. He grins broadly, “That was one helluva job, something I’ll never forget as long as I live.”  

Tinnin, born in Jerome, graduated from Flagstaff High School. A U.S. Air Force veteran, he later worked for the Navajo Army Depot before joining USGS. 

He said designing and building a vehicle that could safely travel in extreme rocky washes and gullies and lava-flow filled ravines and craters on Earth was challenge enough for scientists, engineers and mechanics. “To think of putting such a vehicle on a chunk of rock some 250,000 miles away in gravity one-sixth that of Earth – mind-blowing.”  

Tinnin grants that building the LRV prototype was not nearly as technologically challenging or glamorous as was designing and building of rockets, spacecraft, space suits and other equipment necessary to transport astronauts across the void of space to the moon. Even so, Tinnin praised his USGS boss Eugene “Gene” Shoemaker, a distinguished geologist, with having the vision to realize that astronauts would need far more than foot power to move over a landscape tattooed by eons of space debris impacting its surface. Shoemaker is also credited with persuading NASA officials that the area surrounding Flagstaff was geologically similar to the moon’s terrain, with its volcanic craters, lava fields and Meteor Crater, a huge impact crater formed 50,000 years ago when a meteorite struck the earth. 

Tinnin explained, “Gene and his colleagues knew astronauts needed to train in an area as similar to the moon as possible. He also knew to survey the moon’s surface, they needed to travel great distances and transport equipment, to collect rock samples and to haul all the scientific equipment and cameras and other stuff. That’s why, in 1965, he told us to use design concepts suggested by General Motors and Boeing. We did, and built what became the prototypes for the Lunar Rover that we’ve all seen on TV and in photographs.”  

By “us,” Tinnin meant Rutledge “Putty” Mills, Dick Wiser, Walt Fahey and Tinnin. All collaborated building the first training vehicles ever used by astronauts in their preparing for lunar explorations.  

In 1967, the USGS team began hand-crafting Explorer and other LRVs in a rented machine shop on the east side of Flagstaff. Those hand-built four-wheel drive vehicles featured electric motors and manual steering – either forward or backward – and controls at either end for a driver in a space suit. Because the moon has no oxygen, combustion engines were simply not feasible.  

But the pride of the construction team was Grover (the nickname for a Gravity Rover). Boeing proposed the concept for the field simulator Grover that Tinnin and his colleagues built. Tinnin explained, “We used their plans and built it – using a frame of steel tubing and other surplus stuff we scrounged.” 

The cost for the USGS version of the LRV was about $2,000, Tinnin said with a laugh. “We built it for that, but NASA multiplied the cost by about 10 and said it cost $20,000. And when the one used on the moon was built by Boeing, it cost more than a million. Go figure.” 

He cites one example. “NASA told us we needed to have an antenna on Grover. None existed that we knew of, so I took an old umbrella, stripped it, covered with a metal mesh, and it worked. Cost? A few dollars.”  

NASA and USGS wanted the area where astronauts used LVRs to be as similar as possible to the moon’s surface as possible. USGS took maps prepared by Patricia Bridges, a USGS cartographic artist, and used them as a template. On a large, flat cinder field northeast of Flagstaff – the Bonita Lava Flow – they used tons of dynamite to create more than 200 craters that replicated the landing site of Apollo 11 on the lunar surface. They later created yet another crater field near Cottonwood that was used by Alan Shepard and Apollo 14.  

Tinnin grows sentimental about his experience. “I’m proud to say that all the astronauts – 20 of them – who went to the moon trained on the vehicles we built for the crater fields USGS created. I was privileged to know and work with them, and I have patches from every Apollo mission. I have them mounted and framed in my home office with all my other memorabilia.”  

 

What’s the best advice you ever received?  

“Gordon Swann, a lead USGS biologist who trained all the astronauts about the geology of the moon, told me that no matter what, make those LVRs safe. Lives depend on that. Swann’s wife, Jody, was Shoemaker’s administrative aide. ” 

 

Of all your experiences, what was your favorite? 

“Traveling and working all those years, all over the nation, with some of the most dedicated scientists, technicians and astronauts who believed wholeheartedly in the Apollo missions.” 

 

Where do you now like to travel? 

My wife, Pam, and I thoroughly enjoy getting into our RV and heading to places like Wyoming and Montana. We really loved our RVing adventures in Alaska.  

 

What’s your favorite kind of music? 

I really like country and western. In fact, that’s how I met Pam – at a country-western dance in Flagstaff. 

 

What’s something most people don’t know about you? 

“Well, years ago, I was in some pretty good western movies – Broken Arrow in 1950 and Pony Solider in 1952. Both of them were filmed in Sedona.“ QCBN 

 By Ray Newton 

Those interested in seeing Grover or other exhibits related to Apollo moon missions should visit the USGS Shoemaker Astrogeology Science Center located in Building 6, 2255 N. Gemini Drive, Flagstaff. 

Photo Caption:

Bill Tinnin is proud to show off the tee shirt he received which commemorates the upcoming 50th anniversary of astronauts landing on the moon. (Photo by Ray Newton)