Canoo’s NASA Crew Transports Get Ready for Takeoff

• Canoo reveals electric Crew Transport Vehicles for NASA’s Artemis program, which will transport astronauts to the launch pad.
• The EVs have a range of 200 miles and are powered by 80-kwH batteries, offering seating for seven, though the CTVs will feature customized interiors.
• The first crewed mission is scheduled for November 2024, taking a four-person crew on a 10-day trip around the moon to test spacecraft systems.

Future space missions demand equally futuristic transportation to the launch pad, and in the second decade of the 21st century this means it has to be electric. That’s how the upcoming Artemis missions to the Moon will see Canoo EVs pick up the baton from the much larger Airstream motorhomes that had been used during the Space Shuttle decades to take the crews to the launch pad.

The upcoming crewed missions that are part of the Artemis program, the first of which is scheduled to launch in 2024, will see astronauts at the Kennedy Space Center use Canoo’s electric Crew Transport Vehicles (CTVs), revealed earlier this week. Needless to say, the scheduled launches will be one of the most high-profile outings for Canoo’s electric van, which until this point also enjoyed the acronym LDV, or Lifestyle Delivery Vehicles, employed by Walmart for more terrestrial missions.

The upcoming drive from the Kennedy Space Center’s Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building is perhaps longer that you’d think—it’s a distance of nine miles—and in the coming months astronauts and technicians will practice the steps of the suit-up procedure and the drive to the launch pad.

The CTVs themselves will carry not only the suited astronauts, but also various monitoring equipment and the flight support crew, so the interiors themselves will be customized for the task. This is why previous vehicles, including those used during the space shuttle years, had been quite large and spacious inside.

Canoo will reveal CTV interiors at a later date.

“We are thrilled to be a part of the Artemis missions and to deliver NASA’s first zero-emission built for mission crew transportation vehicles,” Tony Aquila, chairman and CEO of Canoo, said this week. “It’s a very proud day for Canoo and all of our partners who worked so hard to ensure we perform our part to transport the astronauts for the first nine miles of every launch.”

The first crewed Artemis mission will blast off in November 2024, taking four astronauts to Earth orbit and the Orion spacecraft around the Moon and back to Earth. It will be a mission to test the functions of the spacecraft before a first lunar landing mission scheduled for December 2025.

Jay Ramey grew up around very strange European cars, and instead of seeking out something reliable and comfortable for his own personal use he has been drawn to the more adventurous side of the dependability spectrum. Despite being followed around by French cars for the past decade, he has somehow been able to avoid Citroën ownership, judging them too commonplace, and is currently looking at cars from the former Czechoslovakia. Jay has been with Autoweek since 2013.