Spinoff Technologies

  • Tensile Fabrics

    Tensile Fabrics Enhance Architecture Around the World

    On a Friday night in March 2008, fans at a college basketball game at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome noticed the stadium’s scoreboard begin to sway.

  • Methods reduce cost

    Methods Reduce Cost, Enhance Quality of Nanotubes

    For all the challenges posed by the microgravity conditions of space, weight is actually one of the more significant problems NASA faces in the development of the next generation of U.S. space vehicles.

  • phase change pillows

    Phase Change Fabrics Control Temperature

    Since designing the first space suits in the 1950s, NASA has been interested in developing materials to keep astronauts comfortable and cool.

  • Apollo

    Apollo-Era Life Rafts Save Hundreds of Sailors

    The space shuttle is unique among spacecraft in that it glides back to Earth and lands like an airplane, usually touching ground near where it launched at Kennedy Space Center, but sometimes, in poor weather, gliding into the back-up landing site at Dryden Flight Research Center and then catching a ride back to the Cape on the back of a modified Boeing 747.

  • Web Based Programs

    Web-Based Programs Assess Cognitive Fitness

    Astronauts, pilots, air traffic controllers, truck drivers, shift workers, and mountain climbers have something in common: All are at risk for impaired cognitive abilities due to stress or sleep deprivation.

  • Nanofiber

    Nanofiber Filters Eliminate Contaminants

    Water, an increasingly precious commodity on Earth, has always been priceless in space; but “priceless” is a figure of speech—water in space does have a price, and it is an expensive one.

  • Tiny Devices Project Sharp

    Tiny Devices Project Sharp, Colorful Images

    Johnson Space Center, NASA’s center for the design of systems for human space flight, began developing high-resolution visual displays in the 1990s for telepresence, which uses virtual reality technology to immerse an operator into the environment of a robot in another location.

  • Image Capture

    Image-Capture Devices Extend Medicine’s Reach

    In spring 2008, Dr. Scott Dulchavsky diagnosed high-altitude pulmonary edema in a climber over 20,000 feet up the slope of Mount Everest. Dulchavsky made the diagnosis from his office in Detroit, half a world away. The story behind this long-distance medical achievement begins with a seemingly unrelated fact: There is no X-ray machine on the International Space Station (ISS).

  • Neuro Com systems

    Medical Devices Assess, Treat Balance Disorders

    You may have heard the phrase "as difficult as walking and chewing gum" as a joking way of referring to something that is not difficult at all. Just walking, however, is not all that simple—physiologically speaking.

  • NASA Bioreactors

    NASA Bioreactors Advance Disease Treatments

    The absence of gravity beyond the Earth’s atmosphere is actually an illusion; at the ISS’s orbital altitude of approximately 250 miles above the surface, the planet’s gravitational pull is only 12-percent weaker than on the ground.

  • Solar Protective Factory Inc

    Fabrics Protect Sensitive Skin from UV Rays

    Beginning in 1968, NASA began researching garments to help astronauts stay cool. The Agency designed the Apollo space suits to use battery-powered pumps to circulate cool water through channels in the inner layers of the garments.

  • Benefits to earth

    Learn more about the benefits of space

    How NASA Improves Our Quality of Life