Five Nasa inventions built for space that can be used in everyday life… – The US Sun

IN PURSUIT of sending people and objects off-world, Nasa has devised some of the world's finest accidental inventions.

These everyday objects were built for zero gravity activity but serve humanity well on the ground.

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The handheld vacuum, or dust buster, was an accidental invention that came to life during the Apollo missions.

Astronauts needed a small and light motor for operating a hand drill on the Moon.

Black & Decker, the company behind the Moon drill, reconfigured the technology to power the cordless vacuum and other Earthbound appliances.

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Frank Rudy left Nasa after the completion of the Apollo 11 mission to file a patent for a sneaker sole that could be filled with shock absorbent air.

"The basic idea is to inflate the air cushion with something that simulates what's happening in your lungs," Rudy said before his death.

Sneaker History gave Rudy the admirable title of "The Father of Nike Air".

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Astronauts needed to be able to freely use their hands without risk of tangling or unplugging their communication tools.

In the 1960s, wireless headphones were already in limited use by airplane pilots and air traffic controllers.

A Nasa blog explains it only took 11 days to fit the tech into an astronauts' helmet and later innovations cleared the headset for takeoff.

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The soft memory foam mattress was originally invented for a rough landing.

In 1966, scientists at the Ames Research Center developed memory foam as a shock absorber during takeoff and in the event of an impact.

Memory foam never found a seat on the space shuttle but it did spur a new era of mattress manufacturing.

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Nasa doesn't claim to have invented the mouse, but the space agency did provide a grant to the man who did.

Doug Englebart was experimenting with ways to improve human-computer interactivity when Nasa provided the funding for him to explore ideas to make computing more efficient.

Through trial and error, Englebart landed on the computer mouse which he first billed as an "x,y position indicator for a display system" in a patent application.

Englebart never earned any royalties for inventing the computer mouse, according to The Smithsonian.

Nasa's inventions, accidental or intentional, have served not the astronauts but people on Earth looking up at them.

As more of space travel becomes privatized, large companies will hold the intellectual property behind all their inventions and there may be less public reward for breakthroughs.

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Five Nasa inventions built for space that can be used in everyday life... - The US Sun