Surveyor program
Grumman and Northrop, in the fall of 1962, began to design pressurized-cabin vehicles, with electric motors for each wheel. At about this same time Bendix and Boeing started their own internal studies on lunar transportation systems. Mieczysław Bekker, now with General Motors Defense Research Laboratories at Santa Barbara, California, was completing a study for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a small, uncrewed lunar roving vehicle for the Surveyor program. Ferenc Pavlics, originally from Hungary, used a wire-mesh design for "resilient wheels," a design that would be followed in future small rovers.