the talented people who engineered and manufactured the physical solution to make the dream possible. Engineers have taken these ingenious ideas to actualize solutions to resolve problems, some even life-saving, that we experience in every day life. One could think of radial tires as life-saving devices as they keep us safe on the roads and the life-saving NASA spi- noffs don’t stop there. Another technology originally developed by NASA and partners that also translated into an imaginative alternative for human use is the heart pump for critically ill patients in need of a heart transplant. This pump keeps their blood circulating until a match for a transplant can be found. With a limited number of transplant organs available, this life- saving pump buys the patient valuable time for a donor match to be found, essentially saving the patient’s life. The spin-off heart pump is based on a pump that was originally created to meet the rigid requirements for payload, reliability and size for the confines of a space vehicle. Innovators applied this new pump technology to a completely unrelated problem of pump- ing blood through the human body using the same exacting requirements that made it successful in space. Having clean water can also be considered a life-threatening challenge for those of us here on Earth. On a planet covered by so much water it looks blue when seen from space, an abun- dance of clean water is something those of us on the ground take for granted as soon as the tap is turned. In space, however, water is a scarce and precious resource. Any manned mission into space, including the International Space Station, requires an assured supply of drinkable water. That supply needs to be recycled from existing sources no matter how strange or con- taminated, as water is expensive and bulky to add to a payload. Creative thinkers understood that a system developed to solve this problem could also be applied to potable water for locations on Earth where water is difficult to find or where existing water is too contaminated to drink safely. A California company took this concept another step further. They developed a water bottle for people hiking or camping so that they could take water from available and abundant natural sources and render it drinkable. The water passes through a filter using the same technology originally developed to provide drinkable water in space. The list of innovative and imaginative ideas goes on and on. Modern innovators have supplied us with plenty of examples where applying astronaut technology improves our daily lives. Take the space suit for example. In an environment so hostile to human life it requires astronauts to carry their own environment with them, diagnostic devices that can measure
Examining new solutions to engineering problems in metalcutting.
body temperature and body functions like metabolic rates without invasive probes are necessary. The solution to that problem is a customized suit that is a marvel of modern engi- neering. It protects a fragile human body from the vacuum of space and extreme temperatures.
Again, innovators took that space suit technology and ap- plied it to design products that we use in daily life such as in the thermometer. We can take a baby’s temperature without the need to insert the thermometer into a baby’s mouth (or elsewhere) which is a great comfort to a sick child and anx- ious parents. None of these outstanding advances would have been possible without the imagination of people who manu- factured the product that we can now hold in our hands. Although necessity may be the mother of invention, the other side is the imaginative people who see problems and cul- tivate solutions. The mad, crazy dreamers behind the “what if” and “let’s try that” scenarios are often those who turned NASA inventions lifesaving products. The leap of imagination required to spin off space technology into product that saves or improves human lives must be balanced with the technical know-how or capacity to propose a solution. Alone, imagination remains in the province of the mind, an untested hypothesis. Only when imagination is combined with the practical skills necessary to shape that imaginative vision into a usable product that can be applied to the problem does innovation occur. All great endeavors may begin in the imagination but they do not end there. The endeavor ends when the problem at hand is solved. We celebrate those dreamers who have seen problems and have built the solutions that bring all of us a better world. ME
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