When Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the Moon 50
years ago, he famously said “that’s one small step for a man, one giant leap
for mankind.” He was referring to the historic milestone of exploring beyond
our own planet — but there’s also another way to think about that giant leap:
the massive effort to develop technologies to safely reach, walk on the Moon
and return home led to countless innovations that have improved life on Earth.
Armstrong took one small step on the lunar surface, but the Moon
landing led to a giant leap forward in innovations for humanity.
Here are five examples of technology developed for the
Apollo program that we’re still using today:
1. Food Safety Standards
As soon as we started planning to send astronauts into
space, we faced the problem of what to feed them — and how to ensure the food was
safe to eat. Can you imagine getting food poisoning on a spacecraft, hundreds
of thousands of miles from home?
We teamed up with a familiar name in food production: the
Pillsbury Company. The company soon realized that existing quality control
methods were lacking. There was no way to be certain, without extensive testing
that destroyed the sample, that the food was free of bacteria and toxins.
Pillsbury revamped its entire food-safety process, creating what
became the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system. Its aim was to prevent food safety problems from
occurring, rather than catch them after the fact. They managed this by analyzing
and controlling every link in the chain, from the raw materials to the
processing equipment to the people handling the food.
Today, this is one of the space program’s most far-reaching
spinoffs. Beyond keeping the astronaut food supply safe, the Hazard Analysis
and Critical Point system has also been adopted around the world — and likely reduced
the risk of bacteria and toxins in your local grocery store.
2. Digital Controls for
Air and Spacecraft
The Apollo spacecraft was revolutionary for many reasons.
Did you know it was the first vehicle to be controlled by a digital computer?
Instead of pushrods and cables that pilots manually adjusted to manipulate the
spacecraft, Apollo’s computer sent signals to actuators at the flick of a
switch.
Besides being physically lighter and less cumbersome, the
switch to a digital control system enabled storing large quantities of data and
programming maneuvers with complex software.
Before Apollo, there were no digital computers to control
airplanes either. Working together with the Navy and Draper Laboratory, we
adapted the Apollo digital flight computer to work
on airplanes. Today, whatever airline you might be flying, the pilot is
controlling it digitally, based on the technology first developed for the
flight to the Moon.
3. Earthquake-ready Shock
Absorbers
A shock absorber descended from
Apollo-era dampers and computers saves lives by stabilizing buildings during
earthquakes.
Apollo’s Saturn V rockets had to
stay connected to the fueling tubes on the launchpad up to the very last
second. That presented a challenge: how to safely move those tubes out of the
way once liftoff began. Given how fast they were moving, how could we ensure
they wouldn’t bounce back and smash into the vehicle?
We contracted with Taylor
Devices, Inc. to develop dampers to cushion the shock, forcing the company to
push conventional shock isolation technology to the limit.
Shortly after, we went back to
the company for a hydraulics-based high-speed computer. For that challenge, the
company came up with fluidic dampers—filled with compressible fluid—that worked
even better. We later applied the same technology on the Space Shuttle’s
launchpad.
The company has since adapted
these fluidic dampers for buildings and bridges to help them survive
earthquakes. Today, they are successfully protecting structures in some of the
most quake-prone areas of the world, including Tokyo, San Francisco and Taiwan.
4. Insulation for Space
We’ve all seen runners draped in silvery “space blankets” at
the end of marathons, but did you know the material, called radiant barrier
insulation, was actually created for space?
Temperatures outside of Earth’s atmosphere can fluctuate
widely, from hundreds of degrees below to hundreds above zero. To better
protect our astronauts, during the Apollo program we invented a new kind of effective, lightweight
insulation.
We developed a method of coating mylar with a thin layer of vaporized metal particles. The resulting material had the look and weight
of thin cellophane packaging,
but was extremely reflective—and pound-for-pound, better than anything else available.
Today the material is still used to protect astronauts, as
well as sensitive electronics, in nearly all of our missions. But it has also
found countless uses on the ground, from space blankets for athletes to
energy-saving insulation for buildings. It also protects essential components
of MRI machines used in medicine and much, much more.
Image courtesy of the U.S. Marines
5. Healthcare Monitors
Patients in hospitals are hooked up to sensors that send
important health data to the nurse’s station and beyond — which means when an
alarm goes off, the right people come running to help.
This technology saves lives every day. But before it reached
the ICU, it was invented for something even more extraordinary: sending health
data from space down to Earth.
When the Apollo astronauts flew to the Moon, they were
hooked up to a system of sensors that sent real-time information on their blood
pressure, body temperature, heart rate and more to a team on the ground.
The system was developed for us by Spacelabs Healthcare,
which quickly adapted it for hospital monitoring. The company now has telemetric
monitoring equipment in nearly every hospital around the world, and it is
expanding further, so at-risk patients and their doctors can keep track of
their health even outside the hospital.
Only a few people have ever walked on the Moon, but the
benefits of the Apollo program for the rest of us continue to ripple widely.
In the years since, we have continued to create innovations
that have saved lives, helped the environment, and advanced all kinds of technology.
Now we’re going forward to the Moon with the Artemis program and on to Mars — and
building ever more cutting-edge technologies to get us there. As with the many
spinoffs from the Apollo era, these innovations will transform our lives for
generations to come.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of
space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
[video]
Do You Need That Surgery? How To Decide, And How To Pick A Surgeon If You Do
So your doctor has told you some of the scariest words you can possibly hear: You need surgery. What do you do next?
If you need an emergency surgery, like an appendectomy or a procedure after an accident, you usually don’t have much choice in the matter. You’ll likely get it done in the hospital where you went to the emergency room, unless the hospital isn’t equipped to do it. If that’s the case, you’ll get transferred.
But if you’ve been told you need a less-than-urgent procedure — something like a joint replacement, or a surgery to remove cancer — you actually have quite a bit a choice about where you go. That choice can make a big difference to your health.
When my patients come to me, a primary care doctor, and ask for my advice in picking a surgeon, I usually start by asking them a few questions.
The Republican party has engaged in
rampant sabotage of the democratic system: fundamentally reshaping the
judiciary, shifting the ideological center of the Supreme Court
rightward through dubious appointments, and engaging in a sustained
campaign of voter suppression including the tampering of ballots, the
stripping of powers for incoming Democratic legislatures, and recently,
gaining a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court which allows
gerrymandering to take place of the explicit purpose of favoring one
party. This, of course, effectively allows for racially-motivated
redistricting. And now, in Oregon. American fascists have managed to use
the threat of lethal force to unilaterally kill popular legislation
proposed by a supermajority of elected representatives, underwritten by a
majority of the citizenry.
This
is the groundwork for a nightmarish conclusion to 2020, whether or not
Trump wins a second term. Trump himself has expressed a coy fondness for
international authoritarians who can disappear journalists and overturn
election results, free from the shackles of public consent. His
followers revere those reactionary death squads who ran roughshod over a
population opposed to their hateful politics, killing and brutalizing
their enemies with the support of heavily-armed police. His supporters
in the state are gradually entrenching their power to the point that one
party is significantly more powerful than the other, despite widespread
public opposition to their agenda. It is imperative that liberationists
of all stripes recognize the situation we are in: while lawless thugs
terrorize political prisoners in concentration camps at the border, the
government is teetering on the precipice of a chain-reaction breakdown.
The major threat of fascism comes from its appeasement. Each time
fascist elements are capitulated to in good faith, each time they swear
their latest transgression or violent outburst is the last, each time
the public defends them from their critics on the grounds of civility or
fairness, the fascist learns that they are exempt from the rules of
society, and they rush to take advantage of the privilege afforded to
them. They will accept nothing less than absolute totalitarian control; a
nation in which whites are held superior in the written and unwritten
law alike, where women are kept in bondage through the denial of their
autonomy, where heteronormativity is a prerequisite for full
citizenship, where Christian theocracy is common law, where Fortress
America is somehow both in command of the international community and
simultaneously divorced from it as an isolationist ethnostate.
This
is not hyperbole, but the actual rationale being expressed by the
Republican platform and its legislative decisions. We have already seen
the mad twinkling of this vision in the eyes of Trumpists; we now live
with the terrible knowledge that millions of Americans were always
feigning their polite “cultural conservative” objections, always waiting
for the chance to carry out an ethnic cleansing campaign, to watch
starved babies die in the arms of their mothers for daring to pollute
American soil with their presence. If 2020 becomes a year in which
fascist violence and political arson escalates, or worse, is paired with
an electoral victory, there is no telling what nightmare will be born
from the failure of our society to stand firm and proclaim, “no
farther.”
When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as
ours to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it
reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force
