Maglevs are one of those technologies that still feel like magic, even years after they were first deployed. While they’ve long been the workhorses of some major cities’ transportation systems, they hardly affect the daily lives of people who don’t use them for commuting. But they can be invaluable elsewhere – lunar exploration. There is an ongoing debate about the best way to move objects on the lunar surface, and a team from JPL and a company called SRI International believe they have found a solution — by placing a tape recorder on the moon.

Known as the FLOAT (Flexible Lift on the Road) system, the project is simple in concept. It is based on a concept developed at SRI that demonstrates the ability to hover small robots over a platform and precisely control their movements using some form of magnetic levitation. On scale, the technology is still small, as you can see in the video below. However, the FLOAT team received a grant from NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) to study how scaling technology would work on the moon.

Perhaps the most important part of technology is the track. It consists of two mandatory and a third additional layer. The base layer is graphite, which allows the robots to use a force called diamagnetic lift to glide over the rail. The second level is a series of circuits that control the magnetic fields around the rail and allow users to push or stop the cars moving on it. An additional third layer is an array of solar panels that can harvest solar energy when daylight is on that side of the moon.

An important point is that cars should not have brains. The power and control of the cars comes from the rail itself – the cars themselves have no batteries, logic or anything. This reduces the actual weight of the car, allowing it to have a higher load capacity.

Another exciting idea, described in the team’s final report, is that the FLOAT rail can be fabricated at a facility and then deployed by the rover from a coil. The materials from which the rail is made are flexible, which makes the coil an ideal delivery method and greatly reduces the cost, especially compared to normal road construction on Earth.

Another advantage of the FLOAT system is that it doesn’t raise dust once deployed, potentially one of the most dangerous parts of lunar exploration. The team’s calculations show that they can lift cars twice as high as a typical lunar dust particle, allowing them to move along the road without disturbing the dust already on them. Unlike Earth, the Moon’s surface has no air, so dust on either side of the road doesn’t bother as trucks with large booms pass.

However, there is a possibility that some dust will accumulate on the track, especially if the track opens for the first time or if there are other activities (such as ice mining) nearby. In such a case, the FLOAT system can use a specially designed cart with a front broom attached to sweep dust from the track before conventional cars resume operation.

Even hills don’t seem like much of a problem – calculations in the last article show that cars can go both 30% uphill and downhill at reasonable speeds without needing a lot of power. This capability can significantly increase the areas covered by the path, allowing even more sites to connect to the FLOAT network.

Connectivity is the name of the game here, as buffering technology will allow tracks to be placed on any number of sites, whether economic, scientific or logistical. However, one of the main challenges to scaling technology is how to tie all these threads together. Connecting the two parts of the floating walkway remains a challenge that will be key to solving this technology if implemented.

Adoption is probably still a long way off, as there are still many years to Artemis missions to begin building the lunar infrastructure that would require such a system. The team says they may have a working system by the mid-2030s, when a permanent Moon base will be launched. But it’s unclear what the future holds for the project at the moment – there are currently no publicly available sources of funding to consider. However, it is clear that a reliable transportation system is needed once we establish a permanent presence on the Moon, and perhaps a future version of FLOAT will provide that. Source