Technology 3 min read

NASA Home and City App Shows the Benefits of Space Innovation

The NASA Home and City app is designed to show the public how much the agency has changed the world. | Image By Andrii Myronov |Shutterstock

The NASA Home and City app is designed to show the public how much the agency has changed the world. | Image By Andrii Myronov |Shutterstock

Many space technologies are more closely tied to our daily lives than we think. Now, you can discover all the solutions made possible thanks to NASA’s research and space exploration.

When we think of space tech in general — and NASA in particular — we usually think of galaxies, far-off alien worlds, and the unfathomable cosmos.

Although NASA has dropped “to understand and protect the home planet” from its official mission statement, innumerable solutions that the agency has developed for or thanks to space, have changed everyday life at all levels.

NASA has released a new interactive tool called “Home and City”, to showcase all the products and services that were first designed by NASA and its partners as part of their space programs, and ended up finding applications in virtually every aspect of daily life.

EdgyLabs browsed through the web app for you.

NASA Home and City: All the Spin-Offs From NASA Space Tech

The Home and City web app shows you all the advances NASA has brought to telecommunications, entertainment, medicine, meteorology, disaster relief, agriculture — just to name a few.

The website lists items under two categories, home and city, which are divided into several subcategories, each containing plenty of different items.

All these products are based on technologies that NASA has either invented or improved on.

Read More: University Students are Aiding NASA’s ISS and Mars Endeavors

NASA Tech at Home

 

For example, in the kitchen, commercial versions of the water purification and filtration systems, the precision coffee maker, the freeze dryer, and countertop gardening kits were all made based on NASA’s tech.

If we head over to the bedroom, we find flexible aerogels, which were first developed by NASA to keep rocket fuel at low temperatures. Phase change materials (PCMs), found in many fabrics, like bedding, were originally explored to make comfortable spacesuits. Air purification techniques designed by NASA for plants in space were also spun into commercial systems to reduce indoor air pollution.

We can even find a home version of NASA’s water treatment technology in the bathroom in water softeners.

You can find out more about NASA home inventions by following these links:

NASA Tech in the City

 

Out from home and into the city now where we see NASA’s imprint all over the place. It’s perhaps in the air travel segment that NASA’s contribution is more apparent, but the agency has brought lots of other solutions that have changed modern cities.

Manufacturing couldn’t be the same, or at least not as efficient, without power plants whose designs were based on NASA software. And without 3D printers, chemical detection, insulating foams, and other tech that built on NASA concepts, our modern commercial infrastructure simply wouldn’t exist.

Landmine removal techniques, fire suits, face masks, tough textiles, flame retardant materials, water quality monitoring, earthquake dumpers, and other tech and products all contribute to ensuring public safety — and we owe them all to NASA.

You can explore other areas in the city shaped by NASA tech below:

You can interact with the NASA Home and City app here.

Do you think the NASA home and city app is a good idea? Or should they be focusing on more beneficial projects?

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Zayan Guedim

Trilingual poet, investigative journalist, and novelist. Zed loves tackling the big existential questions and all-things quantum.

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