Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Electrical Body Signals Help Researchers Restore Movement and More

NASA has long studied the effects of weightlessness on astronauts’ muscle functioning. With support from Johnson Space Center, including SBIR contracts, Delsys...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Device for Analyzing Deep Space Could Detect Tumors, Air Particles

NASA pulls data from deep space and elsewhere using microchannel plates, devices that amplify particles or photons, making faint signals detectable. Under NASA SBIR...

Spinoff: Health and Medicine

Telescope Mirror Tech Improves Eye Surgery

A system for guiding LASIK eye surgery is a by-product of early research on the James Webb Space Telescope mirrors. Santa Ana, California-based Johnson & Johnson Vision’s iDesign...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Giant Batteries Deliver Renewable Energy When It’s Needed

A large, nontoxic battery that can store energy from the wind or sun was developed by Wilsonville, Oregon-based ESS Inc., which drew from flow battery research and...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Suspended Solar Panels See the Light

To determine how well a suspended solar panel system would hold up to potentially destructive oscillations caused by wind, Skysun LLC in Cleveland, Ohio sought the help of NASA employees at Glenn...

Spinoff: Environmental and Agricultural Resources

Astronaut Life Support for Earth Families

Kennedy Space Center spent decades developing indoor farming techniques for crops and even fish to support a closed-loop life-support system for space travel. Eden Grow Systems Inc. of...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

NASA Helps Serve Yellowstone Fungi for Breakfast

A microbe found in Yellowstone National Park during NASA-funded research is now the basis of a fungal protein from which Chicago-based Nature’s Fynd produces meat-alternative...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

The Science of the Perfect Cup for Coffee

When Johnson Space Center wanted to upgrade the cooling system in astronaut space suits, it funded research into the best approach. A non-toxic material proposed as an alternative for...

Spinoff: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

Feeling Hot, Staying Cool

Using a temperature-controlling material developed in part under an SBIR from Johnson Space Center for spacesuit gloves, Fifty One of London is making clothes to alleviate the symptoms of...

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: 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

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

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: Transportation

Swinging the HAMR

From search-and-rescue operations to surveying farmland, remotely operated aircraft have become important to several industries. However, current multi-rotor designs have one drawback: endurance. Driving four or...

Spinoff: Transportation

Test Rockets Prepare for Distant Landings

Rocket-powered vehicle for testing lander navigation systems supports space companies

How can a spacecraft land itself on alien terrain? NASA needed a better answer than...

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

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: 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: Health and Medicine

Clean Air Tech for Spacecraft Helps Fight Pandemic

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, as it became clear that the novel coronavirus was transmitted through the air, several companies realized their NASA-derived air-quality...

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: Consumer, Home, and Recreation

'Reflecting' on Life's Daily Challenges

Hema Nambiar wants you to ask why her start-up company is called 13-One. There’s a story behind the name, one that culminates with Nambiar and more than 5,000 other women massed in New...

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: 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: 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

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: 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: 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

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

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,...