NASA's Curious Universe - There’s More Space in Your Life Than You Think

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

In its mission to explore the unknown in air and space, NASA ends up inventing a lot of new things. Then, the agency “spins off” those inventions to companies that produce products to make our lives easier and safer here on Earth. From memory foam mattresses and cordless power tools to wireless headphones and dating apps, NASA Technology is all around you, even if you’re not an astronaut. To read NASA's Spinoff publication, visit spinoff.nasa.gov.

You're listening to NASA's Curious Universe. I'm Jacob Pinter. NASA has a big mission, to explore the unknown in air and space, to inspire the world through discovery, and to innovate for the benefit of all humanity. When NASA sets out to do things that seem hard or even impossible, it ends up inventing a lot of stuff, and not just cool stuff, but useful stuff.

And at NASA, those new technologies don't. stay locked up in a warehouse. In fact, from the very beginning, starting with the U.S. law that created NASA almost 70 years ago, NASA has had a responsibility to share everything it creates with the public. You might have NASA inventions in your house right now, if you sleep on a memory foam mattress, if you build your furniture with cordless power tools, or if you navigate with GPS, or wear scratch-resistant glasses. In this episode, we're learning about the pipeline that turns NASA research into stuff we all use. We'll hear how NASA engineers rise to the occasion during times of crisis

and the surprising ways that little bits of the space program show up in our lives every day. NASA's Technology Transfer Program Office looks at every new technology the agency develops and thinks of ways to commercialize it. Each year they produce this report called Spinoff. The very first Spinoff report came out in 1976, America's bicentennial year, And that means the magazine's 50th anniversary this year is also America's 250th. Our guide through the history of NASA spinoffs is Dan Lachny. Dan runs the technology transfer program at NASA.

And I started our conversation asking him what exactly defines a spinoff? So a spinoff is a commercialized product or service that resulted from NASA funding or know-how. The term comes from the 1970s. when Mork and Mindy spun off from Happy Days. And it was the golden age of the sitcom. And there are all these spinoffs coming out. So in the 1950s, late 1950s, the U.S. Congress and the president created this thing called NASA. And in the foundational legislation that created the Space Agency, 1958, there was this language that was very bold and forward-looking and kind of beautiful.

And I quite honestly confuse it with the beginning. beginning of Star Trek, like the original Star Trek, like to boldly go where no man has ever gone before. Like that language, it reads like that, but that's how it's going to sound if you're creating a space program. It's going to be kind of grand. But to paraphrase, there's language that essentially says make sure that all the stuff developed for space doesn't just blast off into space and stay there. Make sure it comes back down to Earth in the form of practical and terrestrial benefits. Like, share the cool stuff with us here on Earth. Now, if that's not Star Trek enough for you, here's Captain James T. Kirk,

inspiring us all to live long and prosper. William Shatner starred in an old spin-off promotional video. NASA has developed medical innovations that can be applied to life right here on Earth. These technologies give first responders fast and reliable medical tools that help save lives. They also enhance preventive care. Spinoffs like these are just a few examples of how NASA technology turns science fiction into science fact. There's more space in your life than you think. So, 1958, NASA created its first technology transfer office.

And we would report to Congress, this kind of stale report, as the government can do. We have conducted the following space research and developed the following. results from our research. And we're patenting things like we patented a mechanism that would replicate a mother pig so that baby pigs would nurse from it. And that was just heat pump technology that we had been working on. And then industry reached out and said we've got this problem that sometimes there's baby piglets and then they won't latch to and go, oh, we'll make y'all a fake pig. So things like that we were heavily engaged in. We had also around that time invented this anti-vibration foam, this open-cell viscoelastic foam,

not for space, but rather for long-duration airplane travel, because NASA does airplanes in addition to spaceships. That later became memory foam, which is one of our biggest NASA spinoffs. The result of their research was a special kind of plastic called open-cell polyurethane silicon. It's temperature sensitive and pressure sensitive, meaning it reacts to body temperature, getting softer when warm, I do. I want to get into some more like specific spinoffs as we go. But I am curious how you got into this line of work and got this job. I think just hearing this off the bat, you imagine like Dan Lockney must be like really an inventor, an engineering tech guy. And that's like where you come from.

We could leave it at that. No, no, not at all. I did odd jobs for a while. I was a schoolteacher for a minute. And my background is in writing. And I was actually thinking about culinary school. And I had enrolled in culinary school. Never went.

But I thought, I'm going to go to culinary school and write cookbooks. And I had this flash moment of, I don't want to work in a kitchen. I'll be like wet and work and smell like garlic all the time. And I'll burn to cut my fingers. And I'll end up working like Christmas night or something like that. And I don't want this. And so I applied for this job. I didn't know what it was exactly.

And I showed up and there's that blue NASA logo on the door. I was like, what? Like NASA? This is 20 plus years ago. And I just fell in love with it. And what I loved about it and the same reason I almost ended up going to culinary school and writing cookbooks is I just wanted stories. And the technology transfer stories and the spinoff stories, are kind of like law and order.

The spinoff structure is NASA gets asked to do something that no one's ever done before. Yeah. Like, bum, bum, that's my long order sound. And then as a result of it, the smart people at NASA start poking around and figuring stuff out, and they work and work, work until they reach a limit in the state of the art, and then invent something new. Yeah. And bum bum.

So there's a new thing. Yeah. And then tech transfer comes in, and that's my office, and we take a look at it and we try to figure out who else can use this and how. And that's the weird fun part. And then the next and final part of the story is some company picks it up, turns it into a product or a service, and then we can point to it and say, yeah, it started off, for example, as the space shuttle main engine. But that understanding of fluid dynamics, as well as some of the valve technology, made its way into the debakey ventricular assist device, which is the first bridged heart transplant implant implantable ever used in children. Wait, what? And then bum-bom.

And then Dick Wolf flashes across his screen, and you're like, and then another one rolls. You know, because, like, you turn on, there's channels that only play law and order. That's like me a little bit. Sys a spin-offs. And they go on and on. But I think, you know, kind of what you're saying, there's a lot of them. They're kind of like everywhere all around us, you know, even if only you had eyes to see, you would see it everywhere, you know. Oh, I get, yeah, people who spend time with me after a while, I go, hey, do you see that thing?

And they go, did NAS invent it? No, no, no, no, no. Okay, yes. Because it's everywhere. It really is everywhere. So I started to tell you that in the 50s and 60s, we were writing these reports to Congress. And then Congress found that it was useful to share with the public. That ended up becoming a glossy, four-color report that we would provide every year that's called Spinoff.

And this year is the 50th anniversary of Spinoff, which is why I'm here talking to you. And we featured thousands of these different stories. Everything from a vegan cream cheese recently that was based on microbial growth nutrition research from a couple years ago at our Ames Research to a software that's designed everything from guitars to Cadillacs to roller coasters. And the span of technologies is phenomenal and their applications is even more impressive. So we've been continuously cranking this book out once a year. for the past 50 years and we got a ton of examples. Yeah. So I thought it would be helpful to take a look back at the very first spin-off report.

For one, it's hefty. It's about 100 pages. Dan says it makes a nice thump when you drop it on your desk. The cover has a striking image of Earth seen from space. Blue oceans, brown continents, white clouds swirling. This was just a few years after the Apollo program, when Americans had rallied around the first moon landings. In a forward at the beginning of the report, there's a reflection on NASA's place in American history. Looking back from the bicentennial year of 1976, a NASA official named Edward Gray called

the U.S. space program an example of American preeminence. And he pointed out that technology transfers had more than paid for the cost of space exploration. Looking ahead, Gray wrote, it is apparent that we cannot rest if we are to maintain our leadership. countries are rising rapidly to challenge our lead. Meeting this challenge requires all available resources. And technology is one of our primary national resources. So I asked Dan for an example from the 70s of NASA technology that made its way into the world. In the 1970s, there was an energy crisis. The federal government, including NASA, was under a lot of pressure to figure something

out. And in-stepped, a NASA engineer named Ed Salzman. He was an aerodynamicist, which is a job title. And he was working out at our Dryden Flight Research Center, which is now called Armstrong. And that's up in the high desert, about 90 minutes north of Los Angeles. It's the middle of nowhere. January 31st, 1977, the Mojave Desert. Space Shuttle Orbiter 101 is being transported from its assembly facility in Palmdale, California, 35 miles overland to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force. And Ed, it was in 1970s, and he's quite the character and a hero, he would ride his bicycle to work there.

So it's the farthest place you could ever imagine. Enough of the mountains in the desert, he would get on his in 1970s bike and just pedal his way to work. And as he was on the highway there, because this is a highway, too, he's riding his bike on. These trucks would pass him, and they would drive by him and kick up these wind borgasies. and just this this little mini tornado behind the truck.

And Ed would shake his hand and his fist down and be like, but he keep paddling along. And part of the reason there were so much turbulence off at the back of these trucks is if you picture back to the 1970s style semi-trucks, they had a square front. It was like a shoebox going out on the road or like it was air dynamic as a sheet of plywood, facing the flat way.

And it would just kick up all this wind. And Ed would think, there's got to be a better way to do that. Ed gets to work, I assume he has a shower, gets cleaned up, goes in, maybe not. I don't know this part. Well, he's out in the desert, but nobody else. It doesn't matter. He drinks a glass of water, hopefully. Coffee.

So Ed goes out to the runway where he's working on the design of what would become. the space shuttle. NASA's reusable shuttle orbiter, part of a new, less expensive space transportation system, a spaceship that will put our country in the Earth orbit freight business. This is Orbiter 101

as it rolled out of the hangar in Palmdale, California. It has been named the Enterprise. And if you picture the space shuttle, it had this kind of nose on it, like Snoopy. It had this like beak, this soft, leading edge. So Ed's looking at that. He's thinking about

his ride to work every morning on his bicycle. And he comes up with this idea. He runs it up the chain to his bosses and they go it's worth trying. The president's asked. And so they retrofit a box truck. And they call Department of

Transportation in and they retrofit this box truck with some steel panels on the front and create this smooth, rounded nose on the front of the truck and then run experiments, running up and down. They go, oh, it saves a lot of gas. It saves a lot of gas.

So then Ed and some folks from the Department of Transportation, the Volpey Laboratory, they roll out to all of the manufacturers of these big semi-trucks in the U.S. Kennelworth, Peterbilt, and they say, we got an idea. And they go, oh, come on, and y'all went to the moon. Like, I'm going to hear what you have to say because NASA's got this reputation. And they listen to them, and they go, oh, that's not really for us. Thanks for your moon stuff, though. All right.

That following year, every truck that rolled off the production line had that same design. And each of these companies, oh, we came up with our own. We padded it. They're our own internal research that came up that we didn't care. We wanted to get out to the public. It's not about the patenting and the licensing. We wanted the trucks to be more fuel efficient. So now you see a semi-truck going down the road, and it's the semi-picked truck

that you will see today, it looks like the space shuttle because of Ed Salzman, riding his bike to work in the 1970s. These are but a few of the jobs the space shuttle can do as it works for us in space and flies back to land like an airplane up to 100 times. So we so far have been talking about technology transfers that happened 40, 50, maybe more years ago. So technology has kept happening and being transferred, obviously. So, like, if I'm sitting in my house or if I'm at my desk at work or something, where are some ways that I might look around and where might there be NASA technology transfer technology sort of there with me that's always there that I just never realized? Or everywhere.

We're everywhere. First cordless headphones. wireless headphones? One of my favorites comes out of JPL, and we developed there a lightweight, high-resolution camera that doesn't draw a lot of power.

And it was for satellite applications, and the reason you want those attributes is fairly obvious. You want it lightweight because you're going into space with it, and you don't want to use a lot of power because you can't run on an extension cord, and you want a high-resolution because you want good pictures coming out of it. So we developed this camera on a chip. And

we didn't know what to do. with it, which was fun and delightful. And we were picturing like, spies could use it, or like, maybe it's a novelty item. Now, there was a trend in the 80s, Dan says, where hiding a camera in a pen was kind of a hip novelty item. But this camera on a chip was destined for bigger things. People who made cell phones found out about it.

Of course, cell phones back then could do a lot less than the phones we all use today. Some engineers thought, what if we use NASA technology to put a camera in a cell phone. Now, Dan wasn't at NASA at the time, but he says the response was something like, that's weird. Why would you ever want a camera on your cell phone? And they answered, in Japan, there's this Kauai culture where this love of things that are cute and

adorable and such. And it's kind of exemplified in the culture of the teenage girls there. Here's what they could do. They could take pictures of like a cupcake that they liked and then send it to their friends. and they'd have these virtual trading cards. Okay. Have fun, y'all. And then to fast forward, what, 30, 40 years?

And it turns out that deep down, we're all Japanese teenage girls on the inside. Taking pictures of cupcakes. Taking pictures of cupcakes to share with their friends. Absolutely. So do you, the same type of sensor in that first Nokia phone has just sort of like stayed around, maybe evolved or some, but like is the same kind of underlying sensor in smartphones today. Camera on a chip. Yeah, we were the first and we actually received royalties from, let's just say all the companies that were making cell phone cameras.

BlackBerry was one and Nokia and everyone was using the same one. Yeah. So spinoffs continue to happen. Technology continues to be transferred, right? Are you involved also in the new technologies that are? So that's what this job turned into. And one of the cool things that I've witnessed over time is, its evolution.

And it used to be, we had this almost like a chip on our shoulder where we'd say, you know, it's hard to transfer this technology to the public because it's not like anyone's building their own spaceships. I've got to all this space technology and we've got to find weird applications for it, like the Zitzapper, which is a story I'll tell you some other day, and all kinds of bizarre things like that. We had to look for these secondary applications that were unexpected. How it turns out people are making spaceships.

SpaceX is go, crew is go Let's watch as Falcon 9 takes crew 12 out into space Four, three, two One, ignition and lift-off Go Falcon, go Dragon, and Godspeed And so a lot of our work is to These emerging space companies Like heat shields and sensors

And different techniques and devices That these companies benefit from That NASA has already kind of led the way on Yeah. But still my favorite part is the large portion of it that's still the weird unexpected stuff, like the cream cheese I mentioned earlier. Another one of Dan's favorites starts with the space shuttle. The shuttle has three main engines that help it get to orbit.

Once it's in space, they shut off and that big orange fuel tank gets jettisoned. Smaller thrusters called the reactor control system, or RCS, then do a delicate dance to steer the shuttle away from the empty tank. The RCS is a very complicated system. So computer scientists at NASA created one of the earliest AI systems with human-like reasoning to control it. The software had desires like maintaining fuel pressures, and it made decisions to achieve those desires. That program caught the attention of a company that wanted to do something with human desires. That then became one of the first dating app, people matching algorithms.

So, yeah, in addition to taking credit for images on social media, I'm also going to take credit for online dating. I don't take credit for Tang Teflon or Velcro. Those are independent inventions that we do get credit for, but I will claim that NASA is responsible for online dating and social media. One of the examples that I've read about is the Speedo swimsuit that made Olympic swimmers way too fast. I remember that when it happened in 2008 because the swimsuit got banned ultimately, right? Non-pharmaceutical doping is what they called it. And yeah, this is a favorite. So Speedo reached out to us and they tested their swimsuits in our wind tunnels down at Langley Research Center.

We also made the material extra buoyant because one of the best ways to reduce drag in the water is not be in the water so much. This is a sample of one of the fabrics that we receive from Speedo. to test in this study. What we do is we take fabric such as this, and we stretch them over a metal frame, and this is the model that we place in the wind tunnel. So we set this in the tunnel like this. The flow moves across the surface,

tries to push it along, and we measure that force. To make this buoyant, reduced drag, a seamless swimsuit that pretty much glued to your body. every swimmer who won a gold medal was wearing that suit, every U.S. swimmer, and then every other country, too. People started realizing, like, oh, that suit's really good. And then I picture Speedo there with like a lemonade stand type thing and just selling a suit to people. Because different nations were breaking their contracts with their swimsuit providers in order to get into that suit. Like, everyone had to have it.

Since been banned. Yeah, that was a good one. Yeah. What is the, like, life cycle of a spinoff? Like, you know, obviously NASA scientists and engineers and technicians are doing their work to study the cosmos or what have you. Like, when do you get involved? And then what's kind of the process to take this and make it something that the rest of the world might use? Oh, be personally, you don't want me involved.

I'm the worst guy to visit the labs. Like, I'll tour NASA lab. There's brilliant people doing incredible things. I'll say, here's this low voltage technique for vibrating the dust off. of a solar panel for a Mars rover, which extends the life of this, useful life of this rover by years because of the challenges that on the surface it gets, there's going there to dust the thing and gets enough dust on it, then the solar panel stop working. And then I say, well, what else can it do?

We, this explores go to Mars. It's doing all this cool stuff. Could you clean a car with it? Get this guy out of here. But my office, how it gets involved, is anytime a new invention is, just, developed or created, it gets reported to us. We then do a process of figuring out, like, is it so space-specific? Is it just scientific?

And should it be published and given away just through general publication? Or is there a better path to get it out to industry? We then shop it around and we market it and we'll patent things. We'll open-source software. We'll license software. We've got a whole different slew of different tools available to us. The challenge, though, is that it takes a couple of years, because we're We're making pretty specific technology and then to adapt a manufacturing process or get investments or whatever it takes to bring it to market.

Sometimes between the original NASA idea, NASA building it, industry adopting it, and then it becoming commonplace enough that we'll talk about it could be a 10, 15 years span. One of the one really fast, though, is you hear about COVID? You hear about the... I heard of it. You heard of it? You had the pandemic here. So during the pandemic, there were some researchers, and this is why I just love working at NASA. There's some smart people here.

So the handful of researchers out of JPL who were chatting in the cafeteria when they were allowed to be in person. This is right before, like, remember that Thursday, Tom Hanks got sick, and they canceled NBA season? And then they're like, hey, everyone go home for a while. This is real all of a sudden. It was real all of a sudden. Let's say that Tuesday or Wednesday they were talking. And these folks said, there's going to be a respiratory disease that runs rampant throughout the globe. We don't have enough ventilators.

Okay. I wasn't cognizant enough to have that thought. I was like everyone else trying to bleach my grapes and hoard toilet paper. So these guys said, we're going to globally need more ventilators. So I went into the lab. And so how does a ventilator work? And they started drawing on a whiteboard. The way this ventilator works is we have high pressure coming in to these two pressure regulators.

These two pressure regulators are sitting the two pressure levels that we need for a ventilator. And here's what a ventilator should do. And then they looked at existing ventilators and they designed theirs using no parts that were currently needed to make other ventilators. All right. So this is our first prototype. circuit, what we did was dismantle a leaf blower to find a three-phase brushless DC motor with a blower and a housing already ready to go. And they used just few parts as possible. So they got it under 100 parts, and they fast-tracked it

through FDA clearance. And within six weeks of having the idea, we were licensing it to companies, no charge, but we wanted to license it to them so that they had the know-how. and the credibility to actually get off the ground with it. So we gave it to 36 different companies all across the globe. And then you dial these to get the actual pressures. So it's, in a way, these are... And it was in particular use in Brazil and India. We've got these large populations of people who need of ventilators

and not a supply of ventilators. We had U.S. companies manufacturing them. So that was a short one. Yeah. Within a couple of months, some smart NASA people said, yeah, we'll need a ventilator. What are we going to do? Yeah. It's amazing.

It's pretty cool. Yeah. Woohoo. Right on, yeah. How does the money work for spin-offs? Because when I think of an invention or something, you know, I think of the inventor just like counting their money at the end of it if it's successful. Is this something where like NASA or the government or the American people profit somehow?

Does NASA sort of turn it over to industry and then, you know, it's successful? industry can do that? We profit nominally. And it's not really, I wouldn't say a return on investment, because this is not what we're investing in. We're investing in research, technology, exploration of the universe and our place in it. Yeah. But we do collect sometimes dollars from companies in order to sustain the patenting program and to, because we pay just like anybody else for our patents, even though we're all government. And then what we collect largely goes to the inventors. So it's an award, an incentive to continue to invent and contribute.

And we're talking a few thousand dollars. Nobody's buying a helicopter. You might buy a used motorcycle. Yeah, nobody's getting rich off of this stuff. It's all meant to, it's bought and paid for it by the U.S. taxpayer, and it's all just our way of paying a bag. Yeah. Like you say, NASA is most of the time not setting out to make the thing that will power cell phone cameras is usually not trying to make a ventilator or a better semi-truck or something.

What is it about this place that does ultimately lead to technology like that? Like, I guess I just wonder if you can make a connection for me between like the kind of basic stuff NASA does and then how does that end up being something I hold in my hand or drive down the highway? I think part of how we're so good at it and we're so prolific is that we're not doing solely science or fundamental R&D. We're building stuff. NASA's engineering.

And it's cut metal. It's putting pieces together. It's, we're building. We're tinkers and makers. And we've got this culture of, at the end of the day, we have to build a spaceship, go to space with it, do something while we're there, and then deliver science and information back to us. And we're just making stuff.

Yeah. If I did have one final note, it would be that this is not something that NASA used to do. It's something that NASA is currently and actively doing, too, which is making its technology available to the public. And as a result of that work, I like to think about these stories individually because each one is fun and unique. But when I zoom way out, the picture I get is that this activity, this Nations and VEVUES, in space technology and aerospace research, and then the follow-through of transferring it to the public, results in this overall benefit to the U.S. economy. It's creating jobs. It's generating revenue. It's making us safer. It's making us more efficient. It's saving lives. And this is just a cool – I was never a space guy. I didn't go into this.

this for space. As an adult, I thought space was something you're supposed to outgrow. I was a skeptic. Yeah. And then one story after another, like, bum bum, like, oh, these are fantastic. And now, again, like I was saying, you walked on the street with me. I'm like, hey, did you know? And like, that NASA invented that. Yeah. But it's, it's everywhere. It's profound. And it touches our lives in so many different ways. And we're still doing it. And who knows what's going to come out of it? Dan, thank you so much for making time for this. This has been super fun. You're welcome.

Thanks for having me. Of course. Dan Lockney is NASA's technology transfer program executive. You can find every issue of NASA's Spinoff magazine or get in touch with Dan to license a NASA technology yourself at spinoff.noff.nassah.gov. And if you're interested in learning more about the NASA inventions all around you, Dan's team has this interactive tool. You can find it at home and city.nassah.gov.

There's this 3D house that you can drag around and find the NASA inventions hiding inside. It's super informative. It's also just a lot of fun. I can tell you from experience, it is a great way to kill some time when you're supposed to be working. So I really recommend playing around with it. Again, that address is home and city.nassah.gov. This is NASA's Curious Universe, an official NASA podcast. This episode was written and produced by Christian Elliott.

Our executive producer is Katie Conan's, Christopher Kim. designed our show art. Our theme song was composed by System Sounds. Other music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Jasmine Hopkins, Anne Harky, Andrew Wagner, and Alex Velly. You can find transcripts for every episode of Curious Universe and explore NASA's other podcasts at NASA.gov slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode of NASA's Curious Universe, tell us about it. Leave us a review wherever you're listening right now. Maybe send a link to one of your friends. and you can follow NASA's Curious Universe in your favorite podcast app to get a notification each time we post a new episode.

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