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Spinoffs: Space Station Innovations in Your Cart (and Heart!)
You might think NASA technology is just spaceships and telescopes, but did you know the camera in your cell phone is, too? It’s one of many NASA innovations now found everywhere on Earth.
The International Space Station has had crew living on it for 25 years straight. In that time, the space station has enabled a tremendous amount of research, helping NASA and scientists better understand long-term living in space – but it’s not just knowledge coming back down to Earth! Technologies developed for the space station and experiments conducted aboard the orbiting lab also benefit people on the planet below. Here are a few of these inventions, or spinoffs, you can find in your everyday life.
A Sunscreen That Blocks Radiation in Space – and on Your Face
After surviving for 18 months outside the International Space Station, an extremely hardy organism is now improving sunscreens and face cream products from a cosmetics company, which licensed use of the organism from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Build Muscle With or Without Gravity
Muscles atrophy quickly in space, so when astronauts began long stays on the International Space Station, they needed some specialized exercise equipment. A resistance mechanism made of a coiled metal spring formed the basis of the first way for astronauts to “lift weights” in space. Soon after, that same design became the heart of compact home gym equipment.
Fresh Greens Every Day of the Year
The need to grow fresh food in space pushed NASA to develop indoor agriculture techniques. Thanks to the agency’s research, private companies are building on NASA’s vertical farm structure, plant-growth “recipes,” and environmental-control data to create indoor farms, resulting in higher crop yields and better-quality produce while conserving water and energy and eliminating the need for pesticides.
Cultivating Hearts and Knees in Space
Gravity is a significant obstacle to bioprinting cells and growing human tissue on Earth because heavier components settle to the bottoms of petri dishes. In the absence of gravity, each cell layer stays in place, which is how it’s possible to grow heart and knee tissue on the space station. The same principle also allows mixing of complex pharmaceuticals on orbit.
Storing Oodles of Energy
NASA chose nickel-hydrogen batteries to power the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station because the technology is safe, reliable in extreme temperatures, and long-lived. NASA’s improvements brought down the cost of the technology, which is now used by large-scale utilities and renewable power plants that need to store energy generated by intermittent sources.
You can read about many more products sourced from the ISS on spinoff.nasa.gov.
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