Woman sets world record bicycle speed:

@karoly-aczel said
I guess we'll have to disagree..

How can you disagree with that? You should know about escape velocities right? On Earth you have to go about 7 miles per second to escape Earth gravity and on the moon 1/6th of that so about 1.5 miles per second, roughly, 1 mile per second is 3600 miles per hour or about 5000 km per hour and so on the moon, you have to go faster than that to escape, say 4000 mph or about 6000 km per hour.

Suppose you have a perfectly flat surface with good traction to the drive wheels and you want to escape lunar gravity with a bicycle. So suppose that is actually possible, forget the physics involved, just say it can be done.

Then when you get up to escape velocity you would leave the surface and be in orbit say a meter off the ground but well before you get to escape velocity you would be at orbital velocity and that is 1/square root times escape so that velocity is much less than escape, like about 5 miles per second on Earth but say 0.8 mile per second on the moon so when you got up to that velocity all you can do is to get a bit off the ground at which point you would be in a very low orbit and you better hope the path you take is extremely smooth because if you are stay one meter above the ground in a real orbit with no air to slow you down you would stay 1 meter above the ground till the cows come home except for the pesky problem of running into a cliff at a few thousand mph, anything higher than that 1 meter high you happen to be orbiting at.

The gist of all that is this: when you get up to orbital velocity, well before you achieve escape velocity you will no longer have traction to the ground to the wheels become useless as drivers of acceleration to higher velocity because now you are not touching the ground and that therefore is the maximum you could EVER go on the moon on a perfectly flat surface with whatever force is driving the wheels touching the ground, whether it is a human on a bicycle or a ten thousand horsepower sling.