Spinoffs from space programmes

What do ceramic teeth braces, artificial hearts, airbags, insulin pumps and Olympics-calibre swimsuits have in common? Answer: they originated in space.

All these gadgets and hundreds more are spinoffs from technologies developed for the multi-billion-dollar space programmes that kicked into high gear 50 years ago when Yuri Gagarin became the first human catapulted into orbit.

Many of these offshoots began with a quest by American, Soviet and European engineers for materials that could perform new tasks or withstand extreme temperatures, cosmic rays and the stresses of high or zero gravity.

So-called memory metals, for example, that flex and recover their shape in response to heat are used for shower valves to prevent scalding, surgical staples and tubing for reinforcing arteries called stents. Sharper-than-steel scalpels, medical implants and even performance-enhancing golf clubs - stronger than titanium as elastic as plastic - are today derived from a related class of space-age alloys called liquid metals.

Likewise the flexible wire rims of your sunglasses... which may also feature a glass coating, developed to protect astronauts' eyes from glint and glare.

Often the product seems quite remote from the technology that spawned it. When swimwear maker Speedo set about making a faster suit, it turned to experts at NASA Langley Research Institute, who had specialised in studying friction and drag.

The resulting LZR line, launched in February 2008, quickly became de rigueur for competitive swimmers: more than nine out of 10 gold-medal winners at the Beijing Olympics six months later wore them.

AFP