Gearing Up for the Race — Online…on TV…and Around the World!

Greetings from Huntsville, Ala., where preparations continue for NASA’s 17th annual Great Moonbuggy Race, to be held at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center April 9-10. And it’s gonna be a bigger, bolder and wilder race than ever before!

Racers from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill., compete in
NASA’s 16th annual Great Moonbuggy Race April 3-4, 2009, at the U.S.
Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville. (NASA/MSFC)

First, as previously noted, we’re anticipating the largest number of moonbuggy racers in the history of the competition — more than 100 teams are now registered, including more than 1,000 high school, college and university students from 20 states and Puerto Rico, Canada, Germany, India, Romania and Serbia. More than two dozen teams are signed up from India alone, helping to make this year’s event a truly international experience!

Next, how would you like to watch live race action from your home computer? NASA will Web-stream the event live on Friday, April 9 — the kickoff day of racing. Web users can catch all the action here:

https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

And if your school has access to the NASA Education Channel, you’ll be able to watch television coverage of the race in your classroom. Stay tuned for more details on TV coverage!

In the meantime, you can check out updates about the race on Facebook, and once again we’ll provide real-time race updates from trackside via Twitter — including racers’ finishing times and all the award winners at the close of Day 2 of racing.

We’re proud of NASA’s Great Moonbuggy Race here at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where we organize the event each year. It’s the culmination of a lot of hard work on the teams’ part, too — and in coming weeks we’ll hear from some of them about their experiences leading up to the main event.

In the meantime, learn more about the race, the course, the teams and the awards here.

Let’s roll!