NASA Spinoff
Transportation
Spinoff: Transportation
Water-Powered Engines Offer Satellite Mobility
NASA Technology
NASA has been planning for a water-powered rocket engine since the Agency’s early years. After all, water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, which have been powering...
Spinoff: Transportation
Unique Sensors Will Improve Aerodynamic Design, Aircraft Performance
NASA Technology
Even after almost 150 years of wind tunnel testing, no commercial product had ever been able to directly measure the localized force that...
Spinoff: Transportation
Flash Lidar Enables Driverless Navigation
NASA Technology
A spacecraft hovers over the gray, cratered moonscape, scanning for its landing spot, and then, in a blaze of rocket fire that kicks up a massive cloud of dust, the...
Spinoff: Transportation
Plane-Launched Rocket Opens Up Space for Small Satellites
NASA Technology
More than ever, day-to-day life on Earth depends on the growing number of satellites in orbit used for communications, navigation, tracking, science,...
Spinoff: Transportation
Doppler Lidar Makes Self-Driving Cars Safer
NASA Technology
Lasers designed to help a lunar spacecraft land on a proverbial dime might help self-driving cars navigate rush hour traffic on this planet. The path from the Moon to...
Spinoff: Transportation
Pressure Vessels Improve Transportation of Liquid Fuels
NASA Technology
Few people will ever pass a rocket on the freeway, but anyone could soon see the “gas tank” of a liquid propulsion engine outside the passenger window....
Spinoff: Transportation
Virtual Airspace Hosts a Training Program for Air Traffic Managers
NASA Technology
The skies are on the brink of major change. The number of U.S. aircraft flying through the national airspace is likely to multiply many times...
Spinoff: Transportation
Weight-Estimating Software Helps Design Urban Air Taxis
NASA Technology
Picture an airplane. What you imagine is probably what most commercial airliners look like, a design that has been improved and tweaked—but not really...
Spinoff: Transportation
Probes Characterize Air and Water Flows over Aircraft, Yachts
NASA Technology
A new approach to characterizing high-speed turbulence in wind and fluid flows is on track to become the standard for wind tunnel measurements—and...
Spinoff: Transportation
Software Helps Design Artery Stents, Lawn Mowers, Airplanes
NASA Technology
When Aloha Airlines Flight 243 made an emergency landing on Maui in April 1988, much of its upper fuselage was missing, leaving passengers entirely...
Spinoff: Transportation
Space-Age Insulator Evolves to Replace Plastic and Save Weight
NASA Technology
When aerogels were first invented in the 1930s, nobody had much use for them. And yet, nearly a century later, these materials could become as...
Spinoff: Transportation
Battery Innovations Power All-Electric Aircraft
NASA Technology
The X-planes, experimental aircraft built by NASA and the military, started out by breaking the sound barrier in 1947 and have been pushing through invisible...
Spinoff: Transportation
Super-Accurate Atomic Clocks Could Aid in Navigation, Communication
NASA Technology
Do you know what time it is?
Spinoff: Transportation
Shuttle Tire Sensors Warn Drivers of Flat Tires
NASA Technology
How many people can think of a time when they got to their destination only to realize one of their car tires was dangerously low on air? Or they heard an ominous...
Spinoff: Transportation
Reconfigurable Radio Tracks Flights Worldwide
NASA Technology
When Malaysia Air Flight 370 disappeared somewhere over the Indian Ocean in 2014, it had flown far beyond radar range. Under a new space-based air tracking system, no...
Spinoff: Transportation
Data Visualizer Enhances Modeling for Cars, Consumer Products
NASA Technology
Nearly 20 years ago, Pieter Buning was in the early stages of his career with NASA, working on an interactive graphics program called Plot3D. “Life...
Spinoff: Transportation
Innovative Design Propels Small Jet Faster, Farther with Less Fuel
NASA Technology
These days computers handle a lot of the work for designing an airplane, but when it comes to seeing how well the new design will really handle in...
Spinoff: Transportation
Design Software Transforms How Commercial Jetliners Are Built
NASA Technology
In the late 1990s, as computers were becoming vastly more powerful, Stuart Rogers began working on Pegasus 5—software that made use of this...
Spinoff: Transportation
Original Cryogenic Engine Still Powers Exploration, Defense, Industry
NASA Technology
At a time when cell phones and automobile features are outdated after a few short years, it may seem impossible that any technology would...
Spinoff: Transportation
Time-Triggered Ethernet Slims Down Critical Data Systems
NASA Technology
Ethernet computer networks date back to the 1970s and are now used virtually everywhere, including in space. Inexpensive, ubiquitous, and easy to use,...
Spinoff: Transportation
Simplified Aircraft Modeling Packs Weeks of Analysis into Minutes
NASA Technology
It wasn’t Walt Silva’s job to invent a technique to dramatically speed up computational modeling of aircraft. But the NASA researcher did it...
Spinoff: Transportation
Hydraulic Carts Streamline Structural Tests for Aircraft
NASA Technology
Facilities for mechanical loads testing of aircraft and spacecraft are often jungles of cables, wiring, and hoses.
Spinoff: Transportation
CO2 Sensors Monitor Vehicle Emissions from Above
NASA Technology
Life on Earth is surrounded by, and dependent on, carbon dioxide (CO2). Plants need it for photosynthesis; people and animals exhale it; industry and...
Spinoff: Transportation
Orion Parachute Innovations Carry Commercial Rockets Back to Earth
NASA Technology
No human venture into space is a success until craft and crew have safely returned to Earth.
Spinoff: Transportation
Software Opens Computational Fluid Dynamics to the Uninitiated
NASA Technology
Sukra Helitek Inc.’s simplified, user-friendly computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package began with Ganesh Rajagopalan essentially trying...
Spinoff: Transportation
Design Software Shapes Future Sonic Booms
NASA Technology
It’s been more than 70 years since an airplane first broke the sound barrier, and yet supersonic flights remain mostly out of reach for civilian passengers, in large...
Spinoff: Transportation
Unmanned Research Aircraft Test Cutting-Edge Innovations
Born out of a desire for aircraft to be able to take off and land capably at airports with shorter runways to alleviate congestion at the major hubs, the circulation control wing...
Spinoff: Transportation
Open Source Aircraft Design Software Helps Industry, Hobbyists
NASA Technology
The old saying about the inability to build a better mousetrap could also apply to aircraft design tools. For years, the best, and maybe only, way to...
Spinoff: Transportation
Multidisciplinary Software to Help Take Aircraft to the Next Level
NASA Technology
Consider any component of a modern passenger airplane, and you’ll discover a remarkable amount of engineering complexity that went into its...
Spinoff: Transportation
Lightweight, Ultra-Strong Nanotubes to Transform Industry
NASA Technology
In June of 1991, Japanese scientist Sumio Iijima had been studying fullerenes, man-made molecules made up entirely of carbon, when he discovered under an...