Venturi Space lunar rover: how Sacha Lakic engineers vision for the Moon

Venturi Space is building a lunar rover, and the gap between imagining it and building it is vast. Creative vision, industrial design and the unforgiving physics of the Moon sit in permanent tension. Sacha Lakic, Chief Designer, works in that tension. He translates Gildo Pastor’s ambition, as President of Venturi Space, into a machine that will actually move across the lunar surface.

The work demands something beyond the usual vocabulary of automotive design. A lunar rover operates in vacuum, in temperature swings that reach 250 degrees Celsius between sunlight and shadow. There is no air to cool a motor, no atmosphere to carry sound. The regolith, the fine grey dust that covers the Moon, is abrasive and clings to everything. Wheels must grip without sinking. Power systems must survive weeks of darkness. Every component must work the first time, because the nearest service bay is a quarter of a million miles away.

Lakic’s role bridges the handmade and the engineered. He takes Pastor’s vision of mobility on another world and asks the questions that turn it real: how much does this weigh? Can we manufacture it? What happens when the thermal stress hits? The conversation between what we want and what physics allows is not romantic. It is precise, iterative, often humbling. A designer working on Earth might refine a detail across months. Lakic and his team refine it across months, then test it in conditions that approximate the Moon’s hostility, then refine again.

The Venturi Space rover is not a concept. It is a working prototype, engineered for mission readiness. The design carries the clean aesthetic that Lakic brings to the work: purposeful geometry, no unnecessary volume, every surface and structure earning its place. The wheels are not car wheels. The suspension is not car suspension. The power system, the thermal management, the communication arrays, the sample collection tools all represent decisions made not for fashion but for survival in an environment more hostile than any Earth bound vehicle encounters.

What makes the project distinctive is the marriage of Monaco based engineering precision with the scale of the ambition. Venturi has a track record in electric vehicles and motorsport. That heritage in powertrain efficiency, materials science and systems integration carries directly into the lunar programme. The rover draws on decades of that accumulated discipline, applied now to a completely different context.

Venturi, based in Monaco, has built expertise in electric vehicles and motorsport over decades. That track record in powertrain efficiency, materials science and systems integration carries directly into the lunar programme. The rover draws on that accumulated discipline, applied now to a completely different context.

The film featuring Lakic gives rare insight into the thinking behind the work. He speaks about the collaboration with Pastor, about the technical challenges that emerge when you move design from Earth to another world, and about the discipline required to marry vision with engineering reality. It is a conversation about what it takes to build something that has never been built before, in a place that has only been reached by a handful of humans, and to do it in a way that advances human capability.

The film featuring Lakic gives rare insight into the thinking behind the work. He discusses the collaboration with Pastor, the technical challenges that emerge when you move design from Earth to another world, and the discipline required to align vision with engineering reality. It is a conversation about what it takes to build something that has never been built before, in a place that has only been reached by a handful of humans, and to do it in a way that advances human capability.