While the space agency didn't actually develop Tang, its R&D includes everything from robot gloves to vertical farming—with commercial benefits back home.
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The interior of the Biomass Production Chamber at Kennedy Space Center in Florida replicated the closed growing environment astronauts will use in space or on other planets to grow fresh crops. The chamber helped NASA provide critical data for the indoor farming industry.Photograph: NASA
As the Covid-19 epidemic began to sweep into the US in March 2020, a group of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory thought about how devastating the disease would be. They knew that better ventilators would help. Within a couple of weeks, they had made a simple, inexpensive, and widely available ventilator called VITAL, which is easy to assemble and made with fewer than 100 parts.
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