Worms on the Moon

Amy Shira Teitel
8 min readOct 20, 2021

In the mid-1960s, before anything had soft-landed on the Moon but well into Apollo’s development towards the lunar landing, NASA engineers started figuring out what a roving vehicle for extended surface exploration might look like. As engineers are wont to do, a team looked to nature for inspiration and found an unlikely muse in the mighty worm and centipede.

Aeronutronic

Learning the Moon

Amy Shira Teitel

Historian and author of Fighting for Space (February 2020) from Grand Central Publishing. Also public speaker, TV personality, and YouTuber. [The Vintage Space]