The 32-year-old Colorado cowboy driving to the moon—and eventually Mars

Justin Cyrus couldn’t get investors interested in his idea to build what we’d need to live in space. Now Lunar Outpost has the first private rover on the moon and is competing to build NASA’s next-generation moon rover.

In a Rye, Colorado, cattle pasture now subbing for the moon, an otherworldly vehicle bumps along a scrubby course of furrows and mounds, weaving around rocks and kicking up a fine dust. It’s an open-concept machine dubbed Falcon—a silver solar-powered rectangular frame on wheels, with a partial roof, windowless sides, and a spacious cockpit flanked by monitors and steering controls. An engineer sits in one of its two seats for safety as the vehicle autonomously navigates around obstacles to a location dictated by Mission Control 160 miles away.

Suddenly, a wheel hits a rock, and Falcon halts, relaying real-time feedback to Mission Control. There, an operator revises a command for another attempt, driving home the hurdles in developing novel spacefaring technology.