In the mid-1960s, though the United States was firmly on the path to landing an American on the Moon, there were a lot of unanswered questions wrapped up in the lunar landing program. Among them was the question of how the astronauts would explore the Moon once they landed.

In 1966, the Aeronutronic Division of the Philco Corporation, a subsidiary of Ford Motors, presented NASA with the results of a feasibility study that looked at vehicles that used bellows for surface mobility. Taking the name of one of the animals that inspired the vehicle, the concept was known as the Lunar Worm.

The system Aeronutronic designed was a tubular moving habitat that looked and moved just like a worm. It was a design that could traverse a variety of obstacles like a centipede, while distributing its weight across a potentially poor load-bearing surface like a snake or an earthworm.

The Lunar Worm used bellows as a propulsion system so that all the moving pieces would be housed inside the vehicle’s pressurized environment, preventing lunar dust from getting into the delicate mechanisms.

After the Surveyor missions and first Apollo lunar landings found the lunar surface to be drivable, NASA developed the Lunar Rover car we’re familiar with.

NASA via Dvice for the full article on the various methods such a transport device was envisioned by.