Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

NASA Research Launches a New Generation of Indoor Farming

The United Nations predicts Earth will have to feed another 2.3 billion people by the year 2050, with most concentrated in urban centers far from farmland. Current...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

NASA Helps Drones Take Flight

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, amid stay-at-home orders, social distancing requirements, and uncertainty about how COVID-19 spread, some residents of San Mateo and Contra Costa counties in...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Safely Detoxifying Soil and Groundwater with NASA Technology

At 5:12 a.m. on Sept. 28, 1982, a train derailed near Livingston, Louisiana, waking residents nearby to the sound of explosions and raging fires. What the residents...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Lighting in a Bottle

John Glenn’s first trip into Earth orbit lasted just under five hours, but today astronauts regularly stay six months or longer on the International Space Station. Experiencing over a dozen sunrises and...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Forecasting Saharan Dust to Minimize Health Risks

Last summer, wind carried nearly 24 tons of dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa across the Atlantic Ocean, to North and South America, hitting islands in the Caribbean Sea...

Spinoff: Computer Technology

NASA-Born Software Helps Weather Forecasting Around the Globe

The 2020 hurricane season was one of the most active on record, and 2021’s is shaping up to be as well, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric...

Spinoff: Industrial Productivity & Manufacturing Technology

Metallic Glass Gears Up for ‘Cobots,’ Coatings, and More

Where are the robot assistants we were promised?

For all the space that robots have occupied in the popular imagination for the last hundred years – and...

Spinoff: Industrial Productivity & Manufacturing Technology

Some Engineering Is Only Skin Deep

Ability to finish surfaces of 3D-printed superalloys improves performance for engines, industry

Recent advances in 3D printing with metals are making it an increasingly...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

From a Lightbox to Lamps

Dale Dell’Ario had a glowing box in his living room, and he wanted to share it.

Dell’Ario had retired in 2013 from a long career in medical device manufacturing, where he’d developed lighting...

Spinoff: Transportation

NASA Helps Private Lander Shoot for the Moon

Autonomous robots building the shelters and other structures astronauts need before they even land is an exciting idea, but is it practical? Testing such a venture on Earth won’t prove...

Spinoff: Public Safety

Stay Safe with Battery Testing for Space

NASA battery safety exams influence commercial product testing

Battery safety is incredibly important in space due to the risk of thermal runaway, a reaction where...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

From Spacesuits to Racing Suits

Technology developed for space has turned up in cars for years. From space shuttle tire engineering ending up in road tires to zero-gravity body posture studies helping make comfy car seats, decades of...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Space-Age Water Purification Anywhere on Earth

Piush Soni didn’t think much about clean drinking water until it became hard to find.

As a gemologist spending long periods in African jungles, he realized he wasn’t the...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

‘Positive Energy’ Captures Contaminants

The carbon-based compound in Aquaspace water filters started out more than 35 years ago in Mike Pedersen’s basement, with a stack of NASA research. Now the filters have appeared in the White...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Space Pens, Pencils, and How NASA Takes Notes in Space

The Space Pen has captured the American imagination in more ways than one. It’s appeared repeatedly in pop culture and even worked as a plot device in a "Seinfeld" episode...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Keeping Warmer in the Great Outdoors

Not everyone would celebrate the new year camping out in the Rocky Mountains during some of the longest, coldest nights of the winter. But that’s how Jon Rosenberg and his wife rang in 2018,...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Measuring Moon Dust to Fight Air Pollution

Moon dust isn’t like the stuff that collects on a bookshelf or on tables – it’s ubiquitous and abrasive, and it clings to everything. It’s so bad that it even broke the vacuum NASA...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

NASA Enlists Trees, Bacteria to Clean Up Earth

NASA explores outer space, but it’s also owner and steward of hundreds of square miles of planet Earth. Populated with scientists and engineers, the space agency’s field centers have...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

NASA Technology Helps in Fight Against Climate Change

NASA technology fights climate change in all kinds of ways. Many of these innovations were pioneered for space travel and planetary exploration before anyone repurposed them for...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Getting Water out of Snow with NASA Technology

How much water is in mountain snowpack? That’s a question science has been attempting to solve for decades. Finally, NASA-developed technology provides an accurate answer, using a...

Spinoff: Computer Technology

Expertise Flows from Computer Cognition

Keeping the lights on in West Africa can be difficult, as the electricity market in the region is plagued with power shortages. While disparities exist, access has improved in the last decade...

Spinoff: Computer Technology

Computers Tough Enough for Space

A tough computer might sound like one that can be dropped from a high table, but in space, computers need to be tough both inside and out. The Center for Space, High-Performance, and Resilient...

Spinoff: Computer Technology

NASA-Born Software Keeps Cloud Traffic Moving

From your streaming TV queue to the cloud storage where you keep photos, servers now play an important role in our lives. As the world continues to need more from these specialized...

Spinoff: Industrial Productivity & Manufacturing Technology

Ultrasonic Welding Makes Parts for NASA Missions, Commercial Industry

Combine metals and embed sensors with this novel additive manufacturing technique

A burst water main is always expensive and messy, but a pipe...

Spinoff: Industrial Productivity & Manufacturing Technology

NASA’s Robotic Glove Finds Commercial Handhold

It’s no coincidence that our most complex, versatile, and useful body part, the human hand, is also among the most prone to injury. With its fine motor and sensory coordination,...

Spinoff: Industrial Productivity & Manufacturing Technology

High-Performance Lasers Make Waves in Self-Driving Cars, Quantum Devices

Navigating the solar system’s vast distances has, paradoxically, required NASA to master the physics of the universe’s tiniest particles.

“If...

Spinoff: Industrial Productivity & Manufacturing Technology

Plasma Improves 3D Electronics Printing

A new approach to printing electronic components simplifies on-site manufacturing of electronics in space and on Earth.

With help from NASA funding and licensed technologies, San...

Spinoff: Industrial Productivity & Manufacturing Technology

Neurological Devices, Racecars, Antennas Benefit from NASA Heat Shield Material

A smartphone can have up to 13 internal antennas to send and receive signals for everything from the basic cellular connection to Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS,...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Artificial Intelligence for Astronauts Monitors Patients at Home

When chronic pain flares, the trip from your door to the doctor’s office can seem as difficult as getting from Earth to Mars. The same could be said for the...

Spinoff: Transportation

NASA Helps Bring Airport Communications into the Digital Age

Some of the best entertainment at the airport is all the action outside the window. Loaded luggage carriers zip past on their way to planes. Fuel trucks come and go....