The Mini Micro Missile
Where does it lead?

Aerodynamic drag resistance on anything that is trying to move through the air is important. When all you've got is a puny human for long term propulsive power, its easy to understand why we all love our cars for taking us from place to place fast. If you are curious, you may have already pondered what would happen if we could make the aerodynamic resistance become zero (and while we are at it, let's also ask what else would happen if we could reduce tire rolling resistance to 1/6th that of current high pressure tires).
It turns out you can answer those questions mathematically OR you can go to our moon, build some roads, and do some testing. I created the cartoon down below for an IHPVA Scientific Symposium back in 1983. In the near future, I do intend to present a lot of the simplified aerodynamics from that paper here on the web site.

Most of that same aerodynamic performance information was also the basis for the December 1983 Scientific American cover feature article "The aerodynamics of human powered land vehicles" shown above. It was co-authored by Al Gross, Dr. Chet Kyle (the famous Olympic bicyclist aerodynamicist and founder of the International HUMAN Powered Vehicle Association), and myself. The astounding moon performance numbers, unfortunately appeared as a teeny subliminal part of one chart in the Scientific American article. Just a quick summary of the fun moon stuff for now!

Producing just 0.1 Horsepower, which a "healthy human" can do for 8 hours continuously, a bicyclist on the moon would be cruising at 237 MPH! That is just 1/10th of the horsepower an earthbound cyclist needs to produce in order to be moving along at a crummy 30 MPH! Once humanity colonizes the moon we really won't need expensive, complicated rockets burning dangerous propellants to get from site to site fast - just bicycles!!
Actually, what is more likely is teeny tracked MagLev vehicles powered by electricity. Using track that the vehicles are trapped to can be built a lot cheaper than a wide paved road and almost would be necessary to eliminate accidents. A dinky 1.0 Horsepower electric motor would have you cruising at over 2,000 MPH! Once studied, the benefits of low gravity and no atmosphere lead to all kind of implications. Analyze mining the moon and electromagnetically sling shotting the products to beyond escape velocity with enough speed to achieve an L5 rendezvous and you will see it takes zip energy!

Lots more to come later!