The company, Venturi Astrolab Inc, released photos and video showing its Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) vehicle riding over the rugged California desert near Death Valley National Park during a five-day field test in December 2021.
Astrolab executives said they have designed the four-wheeled, car-sized FLEX rover for Nasa’s Artemis programme, aimed at returning humans to the Moon as early as 2025 and establishing a long-term lunar colony as a precursor to sending astronauts to Mars.
“For humanity to live and operate in a sustained way off Earth, there needs to exist an efficient network all the way from the launchpad to the ultimate outpost,” Astrolab founder and CEO Jaret Matthews said in a statement announcing the rover’s development.
Unlike the 1970s Apollo-era Moon buggies or the current generation of robotic Mars rovers tailored for specialised tasks and experiments, FLEX has been designed as an all-purpose vehicle that can be driven by...