When German engineers were developing the Tiger II in the 1940s, they probably never thought that a miniature remote control version of their tank would be used to help develop a space craft for the United States 50 years later.

In the 1990s, NASA was stress-testing tires for their Space Shuttle, a very dangerous job that could end with a tire exploding with the force of a few sticks of dynamite. This was too hazardous for staff to approach, so they custom-made an RC drilling vehicle from a Tamiya remote control Tiger tank.

Looking like it was pulled straight out of Small Soldiers, the tank, named the Tire Assault Vehicle, or TAV, would drive up to Space Shuttle tires and drill holes in them to release the pressure inside.

Creating the Tire Assault Vehicle

NASA’s engineering prowess is the stuff of legend. They are famous for extremely tight tolerances, redundancies, and intensely scrutinising and testing systems over and over again. After all, sending anything into space is dangerous and mind-bogglingly expensive affair.

Unlike a tank, which will drive along quite happily with a few wheels missing or some holes in it, spacecraft are very delicate, and even a single error can result in a catastrophe.

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This makes how NASA approached testing the tires for the Space Shuttle orbiter even more hilarious.

The Space Shuttle was a radical departure from previous space vehicles as it was reusable. The orbiter was able to glide back down to Earth, deploy three landing gear legs and land on rubber tires. However as this one was hefty machine designed for extremely high-speed travel, it had a high landing speed and required a long runway.

These high landing speeds meant the Shuttle’s landing gear was subjected to tremendous forces. The tires had to be extremely strong to cope with such forces, and so, like everything else on the Space Shuttle, they were engineering marvels.

The tires were constructed from a bias-ply structure, which is capable of withstanding greater loads and offers better puncture resistance than the radial-ply tyres we have in our cars. They were filled with nitrogen, and pressurised to between 300 psi (21 bar) and 360 psi, (25 bar) depending on the tire.

Of course, these tyres had to be thoroughly tested before being used on an actual Shuttle, and for this NASA employed their CV-990 Landing Systems Research Aircraft (LSRA).

The LSRA was an ex-passenger aircraft converted into a test bed and used at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards AFB, California.

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It was fitted with an additional landing gear strut between the main gear that held a Space Shuttle wheel for testing. The unit would be extended during landings to monitor the performance of these systems.

These tests also aimed to find the failure point of these tires. In typical NASA fashion, they not only like to know how well their systems worked, they also like to know exactly how and when they will fail.

This is where the little Tire Assault Vehicle comes in.

When a tire pressurised to over 300 psi explodes, it releases the equivalent energy of around two and a half sticks of dynamite. These rubber bombs could injure people up to 50 feet away, and damage hearing at up to 100 feet.

During failure tests, some tires would be worn down so much that just one or two plies remained to contain the pressure.

These unpredictable bombs could explode any second and were too dangerous for staff to approach. Edwards AFB had access to a bomb disposal robot, but it was too large to fit under the CV-990, and at $100,000 (in the 1990s!) was a little too expensive to loose to an exploding tire.

So NASA commissioned physicist Dr. David Carrot to create a much cheaper remote method of approaching, inspecting, and drilling into dam