I have a thing about Project SWORD wheels at the moment. Ever since finding Scramble Bug wheels on a 1930's magazine cover and the Alps Lunar Explorer I've been hooked!
The next wheels I've 'taken off' are those of the toy Moon Prospector by Century 21 Toys from 1967 pictured here second one down. In fact all the toy prospectors that have been released have the same balloon wheels.
The exceptions are the miniature hat wheels of the two scaled-down SpaceX knockoffs at the front of the group above, but I'll not get into those as Bill and Paul V know far more than me.
I'm interested in whether the balloon tyres of the bigger toys were based on real ones and if there existed an earlier or later toy with the same tyres.
The first question we've answered on Moonbase many times: the Moon Prospector was a real NASA concept and appeared on magazine covers and in space books throughout the early 1960's as shown here in these two examples from 1961: the design of the balloon tyres was pretty much set from this point.
So were there any other toys with similar wheels? The Prospector's are wide and light, almost like blow-moulded plastic. This puzzle is harder to answer. Possibly the earliest toy moon tyres were the four seen on the massive Operation Moon Base by Marx released in 1961 as shown below.
In 1968 Marx re-used the design for their Johnny Apollo Moon Rover.
But despite this searching, I cannot find any other toy with wheels identical to the Project SWORD Moon Prospector, unless of course you can readers.
There are though modern equivalents. For instance Lego have released wide wheels for their moon buggy assemblages. These would make ideal Prospector wheels maybe?
