BENEFITS OF SPACE EXPLORATION: SPIN-OFFS
NEW!Spinoff 2025 Has Been Released! It is an outstanding resource for relating how much NASA efforts have benefitted everyone. See: https://technology.nasa.gov/Spinoff_2025_Release !
NASA Benefitted the U.S. Economy by $76 Billion in 2023! NASA continues to be an enormous economic plus, generating $76 billion on a budget of $23.8 billion, not to mention the value of spin-offs, tech transfer, or intangibles such as the promotion of STEAM education. NASA supported over 300,000 jobs, which generated a total of $9.5 billion in Federal, state, and local taxes. NASA research led to 40 new patent applications and 69 patents already in the pipeline being awarded, and to thousands of tech usage agreements, fulfilling its Charter to transfer useful technology for commercial use. If ANYONE ever challenges you about “wasting money in Space,” drop some of these numbers on them. For a summary of this item, see: https://www.space.com/nasa-economic-impact-us-2023-report; for the full report, see: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/final-fy23-nasa-ecomomic-impact-report.pdf.
The above-mentioned report for 2023 is still available. I could find no similar Economic Impact Report for 2024. The NASA Impact page is here: https://www.nasa.gov/nasa-impact. The Value of NASA page is here: https://www.nasa.gov/value-of-nasa/#economy.
And of course, NASA’s Home & City page is a goodie: https://homeandcity.nasa.gov!
Not all Spinoffs are Technological! We often think of NASA spinoffs as finding a new (commercial) use for some material, device, or other Thing that had originally be developed for NASA. However, not all of the very important spinoff benefits are things. A really good example of this is NASA SP-4102: Managing NASA in the Apollo Era. After all, the development of the managerial processes needed to bring a huge project with tight safety, cost, time and other constraints to fruition successfully was one of the biggest and best spin-offs from the Apollo program! See: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/sp-4102.pdf. An example of management, NASA Style, can be found here: https://www.nasa.gov/reference/jsc-program-management-execution. NASM DOCENTS: NASA management as a valuable additional by-product of the U.S. Space Program can be a good thing to include on your tours!
Xploration Outer Space: I was surfing channels recently, trying to find something to have on while I fixed breakfast, and I hit an interesting NASA show I had not known about before. It’s called “Xploration Outer Space” and was made in 2015 (there seem to be other variants of the “Xploration” programming, too). This particular episode was entitled “Technology from Space,” and it was mostly about NASA’s Tech Transfer Office (Season 2, Episode 2). It’s an older series, and not strictly up to date, but it has good examples of how NASA-developed technology is enhancing our daily lives. I did some checking; another episode is worthy of your attention, Season 2, Episode 6, “Why We Explore.” It touches on how all astro/cosmonauts have their attitudes about Earth change when the first get to orbit and see how small and fragile our “pale blue dot’ really is. Perhaps you cable or other video media access service carries these shows. Check them out!
SPIN-OFFS LINKS AND OTHER INFORMATION
Check out A+StW’s take on benefits here!
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/new_interactive_website_homeandcity
https://technology.nasa.gov/page/spinoff-2020-shares-how-nasa-innova
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/benefits/index.html
https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/economics.html
Even Wikipedia has a good resource for NASA spin-offs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies