Your morning probably went something like this. You rolled off a memory foam mattress, took a photo on your phone and put on your glasses. Each of those has roots in the space programme.
Since 1976, NASA has tracked the technology that leaves its labs for ordinary life in a yearly report called Spinoff. Some of the stories are true, some are half true, and a few of the most famous are complete myths.
Here’s the space tech hiding in your home, sorted by where you’ll find it.
Where you sleep
In 1966, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California wanted aeroplane seats that could better protect passengers in a crash. Ames engineer Charles Kubokawa teamed up with Charles Yost, a contractor with a chemistry background.
Yost created an open-cell foam that soaked up impact, then slowly returned to its shape. Its first name was “slow spring back foam”. In 1969 he set up his own company to sell it as “temper foam”.
The airliner seats never fully made it into commercial jets. The foam did far better, ending up in hospital mattress pads, Space Shuttle seats and the helmets of the Dallas Cowboys American football team. NASA now calls memory foam one of its most widely used spinoffs.
In your pocket
The camera in your phone
In 1990, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hired engineer Eric Fossum. JPL wanted smaller, lighter cameras for spacecraft, where every gram and every watt counts.
Fossum’s answer was the CMOS active pixel sensor, a “camera on a chip” in which each pixel amplifies its own signal. It needed far less power than the sensors of the day, even though some people told him he was an idiot to work on it.
In 1995, Fossum and three JPL colleagues founded a company called Photobit to sell it. Phone makers became the biggest customers, because size and battery life matter so much in a phone. NASA now calls it the agency’s “single most ubiquitous spinoff technology”.
If your phone camera gets a little too much use, here are 8 signs of phone addiction and how technology keeps you hooked.
In the medicine cabinet
The ear thermometer
JPL has decades of experience taking the temperature of stars and planets by reading the infrared energy they give off, including on the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS).
In the late 1980s, San Diego company Diatek asked JPL to help it point the same idea at something much closer: your eardrum. The result, the Diatek Model 7000, went on sale in 1991. It weighed eight ounces (about 225 g) and took a temperature in under two seconds, without touching the mouth at all.
In the kitchen
The food-safety system behind your groceries
Food poisoning is bad enough at home. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres from the nearest doctor, it could be deadly.
So in the early 1960s, NASA worked with food company Pillsbury to feed astronauts on the Gemini and Apollo missions. Crumbs were one worry, because loose bits of food could float into the electronics. Germs were a bigger one.
NASA’s Paul Lachance and Pillsbury microbiologist Howard Bauman decided that testing finished food wasn’t enough. Instead, they found every point in production where something could go wrong, controlled it there and kept detailed records. That method became the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system, or HACCP.
Pillsbury presented it publicly in 1971. Today HACCP rules cover everything from meat and seafood to fruit juice in the US, and much of Europe uses the system too. Your lunchtime sandwich owes Apollo a thank-you.
In the toolbox
Cordless tools and the Dustbuster
This one comes with a twist. Black & Decker sold the world’s first rechargeable drill in 1961, before NASA’s Moon missions.
Then NASA asked the company for a battery-powered drill that astronauts could use to pull core samples from the Moon. Black & Decker wrote a computer program to get the most out of every bit of battery power, so astronauts wouldn’t have to stop and recharge. Its Moon drill was first used on Apollo 15 in 1971.
That work fed into lighter, more efficient cordless tools, and in 1979 the company launched the handheld Dustbuster vacuum. NASA didn’t invent the cordless drill, but it helped make it much better.
On your face
Scratch-resistant lenses
In 1972, the US Food and Drug Administration ruled that glasses and sunglasses lenses had to be shatter-resistant. Lens makers switched from glass to plastic, which was lighter and safer but scratched easily.
At NASA Ames, scientist Ted Wydeven had been working on a water purification system for spacecraft. To change a filter membrane, he coated it with a thin plastic film using an electrical discharge of organic vapour. NASA turned that into a tough coating for astronauts’ helmet visors.
Sunglasses maker Foster Grant licensed the coating in 1983. Combined with the company’s own technology, its lenses lasted about ten times longer than the most popular plastic lenses, beating even glass.
What NASA didn’t invent
Velcro, Tang and Teflon
Ask people to name a NASA invention and you’ll probably hear one of these. All three existed before the space race. NASA just made them famous.
Velcro came from Swiss engineer George de Mestral, who noticed burrs clinging to his dog’s fur after a walk. He patented his hook-and-loop fastener in 1955 and named it after the French velours crochet, or “velvet hook”. NASA used it on Apollo missions to stop equipment drifting away.
Tang was developed by General Foods in 1957 and was on sale by 1959. It shot to fame after being picked for John Glenn’s in-orbit eating tests in 1962.
Teflon was discovered at DuPont in 1938, when chemist Roy Plunkett found that a gas he had stored for an experiment had turned into a slippery white powder. NASA later used it on heat shields and spacesuits.
The “million-dollar” space pen
There’s a popular story that NASA spent millions on a pen that writes in zero gravity, while the Soviets simply used pencils.
Astronauts did use pencils at first. In 1965 NASA bought 34 mechanical pencils at $128.89 each. Pencils had real problems, too: broken tips could float into equipment, and pencils burn, a serious worry after the deadly Apollo 1 fire.
The Fisher Space Pen was developed by Paul Fisher’s company, which reportedly spent $1 million of its own money and none of NASA’s. After testing, both NASA and the Soviet space agency bought the pens, at $2.39 each. Scientific American has the full story.
So, how much space tech is in your home?
Count them up: the mattress, the phone, the thermometer, the glasses and that drill in the cupboard. You can browse hundreds more examples in NASA’s Spinoff database.
Which one surprised you most? Tell us in the comments. And if you like space stories that sound made up, read about the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, when a newspaper told New York that bat-people lived on the Moon.