nasa
Innovate to Get Ahead of the Competition: The Sputnik Moment
On October 4, 1957, Russia launched a beach-ball-sized satellite named Sputnik, which orbited the Earth in just over ninety-six minutes. The previous frontrunner in the space race, the United States, was now the runner up. Our only competitor had trounced us, seemingly out of nowhere. A month later
How NASA Technology has Turned Into Innovation for Many
Successful governments look to the future. They innovate. They find ways to make things more efficient, both in terms of time and in terms of money. Sometimes they develop incredible products that work better than they could have ever imagined, and used more widely than originally planned for. The p
A Killer Idea: Licensing an innovation back to the original innovator
The innovation of inflatable space station modules, now being developed by Bigelow Aerospace as the basis of a commercial space station, has a strange history. The concept was actually developed by NASA as part of a project called Transhab, which contemplated attaching inflatable modules to what wou
An innovator may have just cured diabetes with the help of US taxpayers
Most people, at least outside of science circles, have never heard of Dr. Taylor Wang, an innovator and the founder of a company called Encapsulife. That may be about to change. According to a recent story in National Review, a device the company has just patented, known broadly as the “Wang Patch,”
