How Space Changed Your Life: From NASA Labs to Your Living Room: The Surprising Story of Space Tech in Health & Home

Your mattress. Your phone camera. The water from your tap. NASA made all of them better.Hidden in your home right now are dozens of technologies that began as solutions to the extreme challenges of space exploration. None of them were supposed to end up in your house. But here we are.If you’ve ever wondered why we spend money on space when there are problems to solve on Earth, this book provides the answer. The technologies developed to keep astronauts alive, healthy and productive have transformed life for billions of people here on Earth.The memory foam you sleep on was developed to protect pilots during crashes. The scratch-resistant lenses in your glasses came from astronaut helmet visors. The GPS guiding your phone, your car, and your delivery driver has NASA’s fingerprints all over it. The food safety system that protects every restaurant meal you eat was invented by NASA and the Pillsbury Company in the 1960s to stop astronauts getting ill on the way to the Moon.In How Space Changed Your Life, Nicola Biggs reveals the chain of events that connects solving problems above Earth to the technologies now woven into ordinary daily life.You’ll discover:The NASA lab accident that saved premature babies worldwideHow fighting space fires transformed protective gear for firefighters everywhereWhy bone loss research in orbit helped advance osteoporosis treatmentThe food safety revolution NASA helped start, which now shapes restaurants, supermarkets and food manufacturersHow water recycling systems developed for the International Space Station are now cleaning drinking water in communities that had noneThe imaging breakthroughs from space research that now help detect cancer earlier and with less radiationWhy your sleep tracker, your surgeon’s robot and mental health apps used in hospitals all have links to spaceflightThis is the story of how confronting the most extreme environment imaginable, with no air, no water, no gravity and no room for error, produced solutions that billions of people now rely on every day.Biggs also reveals how discoveries made for space missions become products and technologies used by millions of people on Earth through NASA’s technology transfer programmes, patent licensing and open data initiatives.Along the way, you’ll discover why space exploration has produced some of the most important innovations of the modern age, from healthcare and food safety to communications, transportation and environmental protection.Solving space problems has often meant solving Earth problems too. Read more