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It came from outer space OR Spin-offs from space
Forget Teflon, the space programme has given us Earthlings a wealth of technologies that go way beyond non-stick frying pans. Jon Cartwright reports
A
SPACE probe plunges its way through Titan’s atmosphere and lands safely on the surface. Over a billion kilometres away here on Earth, a machine fills a bag of potato crisps. Georg Koppenwallner didn’t think that Saturn’s largest moon had much in common with his favourite bar snack – at least not until he got a call from the European Space Agency (ESA). Koppenwallner’s company Hyperschall Technologie Göttingen in Germany runs experiments in wind tunnels and calculates the aerodynamics of spacecraft, including ESA’s. This time ESA had an unusual request: could the firm’s scientists and engineers take time out from their daily grind to help find a way of packing crisps faster? Koppenwallner’s team duly obliged. Sure enough, they found a way to fill 50 per cent more bags using clever aerodynamic tricks with air pulses to speed up crisps on the production line. It might sound strange that ESA is helping out such a decidedly non-space industry. Yet it makes good economic sense. With tens of billions of dollars spent on research every year, ESA, NASA and the Japanese space agency JAXA have access to some of the best technology and facilities in the world. That’s where Frank Salzgeber, head of ESA’s technology transfer office in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, comes in. “We make the best out of every buck the taxpayers pay,” he says. Forget the apocryphal tales about NASA 34 | NewScientist | 16 January 2009
inventing Teflon for space shields, Velcro for anchoring items in zero gravity, and Tang fruit drink for improving the taste of reprocessed water. All were existing products that NASA merely popularised. However, plenty of other technologies from the space industry do make it into our everyday lives. This is the story of how they are brought in from the cold of space. Slick, voluble, confident – Salzgeber epitomises a salesman whose job is to promote the benefits of space technology. Armed with a vast knowledge of what’s happening in ESA’s laboratories and a keen eye to spot where it could be applied, he and his network of “space salespeople” travel Europe matching up companies in want of technological solutions with space expertise. The team of 10 manage roughly two dozen technology transfers every year. Many of the spin-offs Salzgeber’s team comes up with are pretty offbeat. The obvious ones tend to happen anyway, which leaves the space sales team to “squeeze the lemon until the last drop”. But it is these dregs that are often the most impressive. Paul Vernon, who works as a broker for ESA at the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council in Daresbury, hit pay dirt five years ago when he was visiting a laboratory at Queen Mary University of London. He had a brainwave when engineer Ejaz Huq showed him some unusual space
JAMES TAYLOR
It came from outer space
gadgets through a microscope. Given modest heating from an electric current, the tiny cantilevers of double-layered plastic could bend enough to control the exact position of mirrors on satellites. Thinking of potential spin-offs, Vernon suggested to Huq that he put one of the cantilevers in a liquid to see what happened. To their surprise, they discovered that its rate of bending depended on the liquid’s viscosity, and moreover that this rate could be determined from the cantilever’s electronic readout. “My thinking was ‘where could you make cash with disposable viscosity meters?’” Vernon recalls. “And then I thought of the medical market.” It was a prudent idea. Patients at risk of heart attacks or strokes need to have their blood viscosity checked regularly so that they know when to take blood-thinning drugs: if the blood is too thick it could clot, yet if the blood is too thin they could bleed uncontrollably. Spurred on by the $1 billionplus world market for blood viscometers, Vernon set up a company called Microvisk to turn the space cantilevers into easy handheld devices. The Microvisk devices are still in development, yet clinical tests already indicate that they will be the most accurate on offer. If there is one space technology that is exploited on Earth more than any other, it is probably GPS. Aside from its well-known uses, such as the sat-nav in your car, the list of applications is bewildering. Flood prediction, tracking hazardous waste and monitoring individuals’ carbon footprints are just a few areas to benefit from the satellite positioning technology. Perhaps the most unusual, and fun, application comes from a German extechnical support worker, Andy Lürling. At weekends, Lürling would enjoy watching Formula 1 on television with his friends while playing driving games on a computer console. “We said, hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could bring the two together,” he recalls, “so we can race against real F1 drivers and not against the computer?” Lürling had a vision of how this could work. Modern F1 cars are fitted with hundreds of sensors that amass data on key parameters, such as throttle, braking and acceleration, and then send them back to the pits. In essence, these telemetry systems provide virtual duplicates of the cars, which could potentially be forwarded in real time to viewers’ consoles via the internet. The only > 16 January 2009 | NewScientist | 35
”With so many worthwhile spin-offs coming from the space industry, governments might do well to consider the wider implications of tightening agency budgets”
red flag was the most important parameter of all: the cars’ positions. Although each car is fitted with a GPS tracker, these are often only accurate to 15 metres, which would be useless for gaming. Stumped, Lürling turned to Salzgeber’s team at ESA for help. At the time, ESA was holding a competition to find new applications for Europe’s forthcoming, more accurate alternative to the American civilian GPS, called Galileo. In 2006, Lürling won his regional heat and received more than €80,000 to develop his idea further. With the launch of Galileo at least four years off, Salzgeber’s crew pointed Lürling to technology that could bridge the gap and remedy some of the faults of present satellite
navigation. Normal GPS devices calculate their own location from the time it takes to receive signals from several satellites with known orbits. However, errors creep in when atmospheric fluctuations disrupt the signal speed. To get around this, worldwide services such as OmniSTAR estimate errors across all GPS satellites and send out averaged corrections to their subscribers. Lürling’s new company now subscribes to OmniSTAR’s service. Salzgeber considers it one of his top success stories as the company has had requests from 20,000 gamers keen to try out the technology. In October, more than 5000 of them tested a beta version of the software at a GT race and Lürling’s team found they could measure the cars’ positions to
Spin-offs from space Many technologies developed for the space programme are proving invaluable on Earth A sun-protection suit for those who react strongly to UV rays was developed based on space-suit visors
Scratch-resistant technology for protecting astronauts’ visors from dirt and other particles used for sunglasses
A portable clean room for hospitals was developed from a system used to clean air for astronauts
Synthetic soil that slowly releases growth nutrients is being used to keep golf courses green
A system to monitor babies for cot death was developed from instruments that monitor astronauts' breathing
Pyrotechnics used for airbag inflation on boats comes from spacecraft launchers
Miniature ceramic gas sensors that test oxygen levels adapted for breath analysis
Damping in spacecraft used to smooth the ride of convertible cars
Flame-proof fabric and lightweight breathing systems for astronauts used by firefighters on Earth
Wireless sensors that monitor external systems on spacecraft used in construction, for example to monitor stress in bridges
A wristband for diabetics that has a self-powered pump to inject insulin was developed using piezoelectrics that damp optical equipment on satellites
36 | NewScientist | 16 January 2010
A “roboclimber” used to prevent landslides works using algorithms created to control satellites
Solar panels and light materials on the solar-powered car Nuna II, winner of the 2003 world solar challenge race, came from satellites
around 10 centimetres (real-timeracing.com). Lürling is now in talks with big games manufacturers and, pending contracts, it might not be long before couch potatoes everywhere can race alongside Lewis Hamilton. Across the Atlantic, NASA is behind some of the space industry’s classic spin-offs. Among the best known is Black & Decker’s portable Dustbuster vacuum cleaner. NASA asked Black & Decker to design a drill capable of penetrating 3 metres into the lunar surface that had low power consumption. Its efficiency enabled the company to build a portable vacuum cleaner that ran on batteries. Then there is the story of surgeons George Noon and the late Michael DeBakey at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. Back in 1984, they performed a life-saving transplant on a patient who had suffered a heart attack. For decades DeBakey had been developing artificial blood pumps to assist weak hearts and, together with Noon, he wanted to create one with an improved design. As it happened, their recovering patient was NASA rocket engineer David Saucier. Saucier had expertise in the huge pumps that feed propellant to the engines of the space shuttle, and he knew three NASA engineers who could help. He introduced them to DeBakey and Noon and they began work on an “axial flow” space-shuttle pump which contains a screw-like propeller sealed in a pipe. Experiments on initial versions destroyed blood cells passing through, but after about 50 attempts they settled on a design that was good enough for tests on animals. “NASA had experience pumping fuel, but not pumping blood,” says Noon. Had DeBakey and Noon’s final pump existed when Saucier had his heart attack, he might have been able to use it to support his heart instead of a transplant. (Although his transplant was a success, he died later from cancer.) Even so, since 2003 the pump has been implanted in more than 400 patients whose hearts were failing. Its benefits include being very reliable as it has just one moving part and no valves, as well as creating little noise. Crucially, its small size means it can also be implanted in children. In this instance the surgeons were lucky to have stumbled upon the right expert, but this is not always the case. Many success stories come about solely through the imagination of the space agency’s technology-transfer brokers, who have the onerous task of matching a client’s problems to a solution
JAMES TAYLOR
hidden within a bank of available technology. Although there are websites, databases and periodicals to consult, results often come down to a broker’s general knowledge. “It’s frustrating because I only have so many brain cells,” says Michele Brekke, director of innovative partnerships at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. “I wish I could store all of our technology and information in my brain so when I am out talking I can connect the dots.”
Lucky break Brekke can cite many cases of remarkable spin-offs. In one, she explains how technology used for docking spacecraft is enabling thousands of people to see without glasses or contact lenses. Called LADAR, the technology works in a similar way to radar, calculating the range of an object from the time it takes for a pulse to reach it and then be reflected back. The main difference is that the pulses are laser light rather than radio waves. LADAR is what allows spacecraft to rendezvous with millimetre precision. For those with poor eyesight, however, the key trait is that it can send and receive pulses thousands of times per second. Normally when patients undergo corrective laser eye surgery, surgeons use video cameras to track the position of the eye so that the surgical
laser targets the right place on the cornea. But a person’s eyes can make rapid saccadic movements which cannot be picked up by video and which can force surgeons to cancel the procedure. LADAR, on the other hand, can track eye movements so fast that saccadic movements don’t matter. With so many worthwhile spin-offs coming from the space industry (see diagram, left), governments might do well to consider the wider implications of tightening agency budgets. Although ESA member states are standing firm in the face of global recession, requesting an €800 million budget increase for next year, times are tough over at NASA. The proportion of the total federal budget spent on the US agency has slumped since the 1990s, and Congress has yet to decide whether to dole out the extra cash necessary for a return to human space exploration. “I appreciate that our administration has a lot of irons in the fire, and I accept the decisions that they make on NASA’s budget,” says Brekke. “I challenge NASA employees to make the most out of the budget that we are given.” Ironically, the spin-off that best demonstrates the importance of the space industry didn’t even feature in an original mission plan. It is a technology that enables doctors to search for the faint outline of tumours in mammograms, allowing them to check for breast cancer without resorting
to the knife. It is saving millions of women pain, scarring and radiation exposure, while cutting US healthcare bills by an estimated $1 billion every year. Ultimately, it is saving lives. So where did it come from? Simply put, it came from a cock-up. Just weeks after the launch of the Hubble space telescope in April 1990, NASA engineers were aghast to discover that a flawed mirror was blurring the relayed images. The fix would mean introducing corrective optics into the telescope’s light path – Hubble’s spectacles, as they came to be known. But astronauts wouldn’t be able to fit them for more than three years. Impatient, NASA scientists looked for ad-hoc ways of correcting the images. They soon became experts in digital-image manipulation, creating new sharpening software that irons out statistically insignificant features. And since 1994, it is this same software that has been used by Lorad Corporation in Danbury, Connecticut, for breast-cancer screening. “For me that was a great example of space technology being of benefit to the people,” says Brekke. Even when missions fail millions of kilometres away in the cold, dark depths of space, they can succeed beyond our wildest dreams right here on Earth. ■ Jon Cartwright is a writer based in Bristol, UK 16 January 2010 | NewScientist | 37
A
SPACE probe plunges its way through Titan’s atmosphere and lands safely on the surface. Over a billion kilometres away here on Earth, a machine fills a bag of potato crisps. Georg Koppenwallner didn’t think that Saturn’s largest moon had much in common with his favourite bar snack – at least not until he got a call from the European Space Agency (ESA). Koppenwallner’s company Hyperschall Technologie Göttingen in Germany runs experiments in wind tunnels and calculates the aerodynamics of spacecraft, including ESA’s. This time ESA had an unusual request: could the firm’s scientists and engineers take time out from their daily grind to help find a way of packing crisps faster? Koppenwallner’s team duly obliged. Sure enough, they found a way to fill 50 per cent more bags using clever aerodynamic tricks with air pulses to speed up crisps on the production line. It might sound strange that ESA is helping out such a decidedly non-space industry. Yet it makes good economic sense. With tens of billions of dollars spent on research every year, ESA, NASA and the Japanese space agency JAXA have access to some of the best technology and facilities in the world. That’s where Frank Salzgeber, head of ESA’s technology transfer office in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, comes in. “We make the best out of every buck the taxpayers pay,” he says. Forget the apocryphal tales about NASA 34 | NewScientist | 16 January 2009
inventing Teflon for space shields, Velcro for anchoring items in zero gravity, and Tang fruit drink for improving the taste of reprocessed water. All were existing products that NASA merely popularised. However, plenty of other technologies from the space industry do make it into our everyday lives. This is the story of how they are brought in from the cold of space. Slick, voluble, confident – Salzgeber epitomises a salesman whose job is to promote the benefits of space technology. Armed with a vast knowledge of what’s happening in ESA’s laboratories and a keen eye to spot where it could be applied, he and his network of “space salespeople” travel Europe matching up companies in want of technological solutions with space expertise. The team of 10 manage roughly two dozen technology transfers every year. Many of the spin-offs Salzgeber’s team comes up with are pretty offbeat. The obvious ones tend to happen anyway, which leaves the space sales team to “squeeze the lemon until the last drop”. But it is these dregs that are often the most impressive. Paul Vernon, who works as a broker for ESA at the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council in Daresbury, hit pay dirt five years ago when he was visiting a laboratory at Queen Mary University of London. He had a brainwave when engineer Ejaz Huq showed him some unusual space
JAMES TAYLOR
It came from outer space
gadgets through a microscope. Given modest heating from an electric current, the tiny cantilevers of double-layered plastic could bend enough to control the exact position of mirrors on satellites. Thinking of potential spin-offs, Vernon suggested to Huq that he put one of the cantilevers in a liquid to see what happened. To their surprise, they discovered that its rate of bending depended on the liquid’s viscosity, and moreover that this rate could be determined from the cantilever’s electronic readout. “My thinking was ‘where could you make cash with disposable viscosity meters?’” Vernon recalls. “And then I thought of the medical market.” It was a prudent idea. Patients at risk of heart attacks or strokes need to have their blood viscosity checked regularly so that they know when to take blood-thinning drugs: if the blood is too thick it could clot, yet if the blood is too thin they could bleed uncontrollably. Spurred on by the $1 billionplus world market for blood viscometers, Vernon set up a company called Microvisk to turn the space cantilevers into easy handheld devices. The Microvisk devices are still in development, yet clinical tests already indicate that they will be the most accurate on offer. If there is one space technology that is exploited on Earth more than any other, it is probably GPS. Aside from its well-known uses, such as the sat-nav in your car, the list of applications is bewildering. Flood prediction, tracking hazardous waste and monitoring individuals’ carbon footprints are just a few areas to benefit from the satellite positioning technology. Perhaps the most unusual, and fun, application comes from a German extechnical support worker, Andy Lürling. At weekends, Lürling would enjoy watching Formula 1 on television with his friends while playing driving games on a computer console. “We said, hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could bring the two together,” he recalls, “so we can race against real F1 drivers and not against the computer?” Lürling had a vision of how this could work. Modern F1 cars are fitted with hundreds of sensors that amass data on key parameters, such as throttle, braking and acceleration, and then send them back to the pits. In essence, these telemetry systems provide virtual duplicates of the cars, which could potentially be forwarded in real time to viewers’ consoles via the internet. The only > 16 January 2009 | NewScientist | 35
”With so many worthwhile spin-offs coming from the space industry, governments might do well to consider the wider implications of tightening agency budgets”
red flag was the most important parameter of all: the cars’ positions. Although each car is fitted with a GPS tracker, these are often only accurate to 15 metres, which would be useless for gaming. Stumped, Lürling turned to Salzgeber’s team at ESA for help. At the time, ESA was holding a competition to find new applications for Europe’s forthcoming, more accurate alternative to the American civilian GPS, called Galileo. In 2006, Lürling won his regional heat and received more than €80,000 to develop his idea further. With the launch of Galileo at least four years off, Salzgeber’s crew pointed Lürling to technology that could bridge the gap and remedy some of the faults of present satellite
navigation. Normal GPS devices calculate their own location from the time it takes to receive signals from several satellites with known orbits. However, errors creep in when atmospheric fluctuations disrupt the signal speed. To get around this, worldwide services such as OmniSTAR estimate errors across all GPS satellites and send out averaged corrections to their subscribers. Lürling’s new company now subscribes to OmniSTAR’s service. Salzgeber considers it one of his top success stories as the company has had requests from 20,000 gamers keen to try out the technology. In October, more than 5000 of them tested a beta version of the software at a GT race and Lürling’s team found they could measure the cars’ positions to
Spin-offs from space Many technologies developed for the space programme are proving invaluable on Earth A sun-protection suit for those who react strongly to UV rays was developed based on space-suit visors
Scratch-resistant technology for protecting astronauts’ visors from dirt and other particles used for sunglasses
A portable clean room for hospitals was developed from a system used to clean air for astronauts
Synthetic soil that slowly releases growth nutrients is being used to keep golf courses green
A system to monitor babies for cot death was developed from instruments that monitor astronauts' breathing
Pyrotechnics used for airbag inflation on boats comes from spacecraft launchers
Miniature ceramic gas sensors that test oxygen levels adapted for breath analysis
Damping in spacecraft used to smooth the ride of convertible cars
Flame-proof fabric and lightweight breathing systems for astronauts used by firefighters on Earth
Wireless sensors that monitor external systems on spacecraft used in construction, for example to monitor stress in bridges
A wristband for diabetics that has a self-powered pump to inject insulin was developed using piezoelectrics that damp optical equipment on satellites
36 | NewScientist | 16 January 2010
A “roboclimber” used to prevent landslides works using algorithms created to control satellites
Solar panels and light materials on the solar-powered car Nuna II, winner of the 2003 world solar challenge race, came from satellites
around 10 centimetres (real-timeracing.com). Lürling is now in talks with big games manufacturers and, pending contracts, it might not be long before couch potatoes everywhere can race alongside Lewis Hamilton. Across the Atlantic, NASA is behind some of the space industry’s classic spin-offs. Among the best known is Black & Decker’s portable Dustbuster vacuum cleaner. NASA asked Black & Decker to design a drill capable of penetrating 3 metres into the lunar surface that had low power consumption. Its efficiency enabled the company to build a portable vacuum cleaner that ran on batteries. Then there is the story of surgeons George Noon and the late Michael DeBakey at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. Back in 1984, they performed a life-saving transplant on a patient who had suffered a heart attack. For decades DeBakey had been developing artificial blood pumps to assist weak hearts and, together with Noon, he wanted to create one with an improved design. As it happened, their recovering patient was NASA rocket engineer David Saucier. Saucier had expertise in the huge pumps that feed propellant to the engines of the space shuttle, and he knew three NASA engineers who could help. He introduced them to DeBakey and Noon and they began work on an “axial flow” space-shuttle pump which contains a screw-like propeller sealed in a pipe. Experiments on initial versions destroyed blood cells passing through, but after about 50 attempts they settled on a design that was good enough for tests on animals. “NASA had experience pumping fuel, but not pumping blood,” says Noon. Had DeBakey and Noon’s final pump existed when Saucier had his heart attack, he might have been able to use it to support his heart instead of a transplant. (Although his transplant was a success, he died later from cancer.) Even so, since 2003 the pump has been implanted in more than 400 patients whose hearts were failing. Its benefits include being very reliable as it has just one moving part and no valves, as well as creating little noise. Crucially, its small size means it can also be implanted in children. In this instance the surgeons were lucky to have stumbled upon the right expert, but this is not always the case. Many success stories come about solely through the imagination of the space agency’s technology-transfer brokers, who have the onerous task of matching a client’s problems to a solution
JAMES TAYLOR
hidden within a bank of available technology. Although there are websites, databases and periodicals to consult, results often come down to a broker’s general knowledge. “It’s frustrating because I only have so many brain cells,” says Michele Brekke, director of innovative partnerships at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. “I wish I could store all of our technology and information in my brain so when I am out talking I can connect the dots.”
Lucky break Brekke can cite many cases of remarkable spin-offs. In one, she explains how technology used for docking spacecraft is enabling thousands of people to see without glasses or contact lenses. Called LADAR, the technology works in a similar way to radar, calculating the range of an object from the time it takes for a pulse to reach it and then be reflected back. The main difference is that the pulses are laser light rather than radio waves. LADAR is what allows spacecraft to rendezvous with millimetre precision. For those with poor eyesight, however, the key trait is that it can send and receive pulses thousands of times per second. Normally when patients undergo corrective laser eye surgery, surgeons use video cameras to track the position of the eye so that the surgical
laser targets the right place on the cornea. But a person’s eyes can make rapid saccadic movements which cannot be picked up by video and which can force surgeons to cancel the procedure. LADAR, on the other hand, can track eye movements so fast that saccadic movements don’t matter. With so many worthwhile spin-offs coming from the space industry (see diagram, left), governments might do well to consider the wider implications of tightening agency budgets. Although ESA member states are standing firm in the face of global recession, requesting an €800 million budget increase for next year, times are tough over at NASA. The proportion of the total federal budget spent on the US agency has slumped since the 1990s, and Congress has yet to decide whether to dole out the extra cash necessary for a return to human space exploration. “I appreciate that our administration has a lot of irons in the fire, and I accept the decisions that they make on NASA’s budget,” says Brekke. “I challenge NASA employees to make the most out of the budget that we are given.” Ironically, the spin-off that best demonstrates the importance of the space industry didn’t even feature in an original mission plan. It is a technology that enables doctors to search for the faint outline of tumours in mammograms, allowing them to check for breast cancer without resorting
to the knife. It is saving millions of women pain, scarring and radiation exposure, while cutting US healthcare bills by an estimated $1 billion every year. Ultimately, it is saving lives. So where did it come from? Simply put, it came from a cock-up. Just weeks after the launch of the Hubble space telescope in April 1990, NASA engineers were aghast to discover that a flawed mirror was blurring the relayed images. The fix would mean introducing corrective optics into the telescope’s light path – Hubble’s spectacles, as they came to be known. But astronauts wouldn’t be able to fit them for more than three years. Impatient, NASA scientists looked for ad-hoc ways of correcting the images. They soon became experts in digital-image manipulation, creating new sharpening software that irons out statistically insignificant features. And since 1994, it is this same software that has been used by Lorad Corporation in Danbury, Connecticut, for breast-cancer screening. “For me that was a great example of space technology being of benefit to the people,” says Brekke. Even when missions fail millions of kilometres away in the cold, dark depths of space, they can succeed beyond our wildest dreams right here on Earth. ■ Jon Cartwright is a writer based in Bristol, UK 16 January 2010 | NewScientist | 37