NEW ORLEANS, LA, 02-APR-04 -- Students from Engineering Explorer Post 314 today won the Great Moonbuggy Race beating out 24 other teams in a nationwide competition at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

A “live” interview with the winning high school team and B-roll will be broadcast via satellite to New Orleans media between 2:20 and 2:40 p.m. (Central Time) Saturday, April 3. The satellite coordinates are AMC 9, Transponder 9C, 85 degrees west longitude, Frequency 3880 and Audio 6.8. For more information, call NASA’s Jack Robertson at 256-544-1517, Martin Jensen at 256-651-4712 or the live truck at 256-864-7823 or 7824.

The high school students designed and built two moonbuggies over the past six months with the assistance of Lockheed Martin engineers who accompanied the students to the competition.

The winning team of Megan Martinez (Academy of the Sacred Heart) and Billy Gauley (Pearl River High) clocked a time of 4:14 over a ? mile “moon-like” surface course full of obstacles -- a full 26 seconds ahead of second place.

The moonbuggies, which are similar to those ridden by the Apollo rover team on the Moon over 30 years ago, are pedal-driven by a male and female team member and must fold up into a space no more than 4 feet high, 4 feet wide and 4 feet long to simulate the original moonbuggy designs.

The college moonbuggy competition is Saturday, and the Explorer Post in New Orleans has a team entered there too. Altogether, 19 area high school and college students are competing.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Michoud Operations designs and builds the Space Shuttle External Tank at the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans and has sponsored the Engineering Explorer Post since its inception in 1996. The company also designs and assembles large aluminum and composite structures for aerospace and other applications.