NASA Technologies Benefit Our Lives. Have you ever wondered how space exploration impacts your daily life? Space exploration has created new markets and new technologies that have spurred our economy and changed our lives in many ways. This year, NASA unveiled two new complementary interactive Web features, NASA City and NASA @ Home, available at www.nasa.gov/city. The new features highlight how space pervades our lives, invisible yet critical to so many aspects of our daily activities and well-being.
Contrary to popular belief, NASA didn’t invent Tang. But the space agency's contributions to people's everyday lives here on Earth still run wide and deep.
NASA's primary charter is to explore and better understand the cosmos. But much of the technology NASA developed in reaching for the stars has filtered down to the masses, leading to innovations like more nutritious infant formula and sunglasses that block harmful ultraviolet light.
"We get better airplanes, or we get better weather forecasting from space stuff, sure," said Daniel Lockney, program executive in technology transfer and spinoff partnerships at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. "But we also get better-fed children. That kind of stuff, people don't necessarily associate."
Some of the technologies most closely associated with NASA were utilized — and in some cases popularized — by the space agency rather than invented by its scientists.
There's the orange-flavored drink Tang, for instance, which was developed by General Foods in 1957. Or Velcro, a Swiss invention from the 1940s. Or Teflon, a synthetic polymer that has found widespread use as an industrial lubricant and a nonstick coating for pots and pans.
"Teflon we get all the time," Lockney told SPACE.com. "But that was DuPont."
But the list of NASA inventions that have benefited the public is long and storied. There's "memory foam," for example, which today pads the helmets of football players and is used to manufacture prosthetic limbs. NASA scientists invented the substance in 1966 to make airplane seats safer and more comfortable.
NASA research investigating the nutritional value of algae led to the discovery of a nutrient that had previously only been found in human breast milk. The compound, which is thought to be important to eye and brain development, has since found its way into 95 percent of the infant formula sold in the United States, Lockney said.
There are many more. NASA research led to the development of sunglasses that block damaging blue and ultraviolet light, for example. One-third of all cell phone cameras use technology originally developed for NASA spacecraft.
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