REACHING FOR THE STARS

THAT GOVERNMENT-FUNDED space agency your taxes support, NASA, doesn’t just strap people to the top of a firework and aim them at the Moon. It doesn’t even do that much now, but focuses on robotic exploration of Mars and crewing the International Space Station.

This is an agency, after all, that has three probes currently on their way out of the solar system, including the fastest human vehicle ever launched. It has put robots on Mars, probes on Venus (briefly), and sent more to investigate Mercury and the outer planets. Its latest Martian rover is a nuclear-powered laser-armed tank with a helicopter strapped to it.

Along the way, you’d expect it to pick up some neat new technology—and it has. Some of it has become so everyday that we almost no longer think of it, and some of it is in your PC. So, from the essential to the futuristic to the urban myths, here are the NASA inventions that have helped humanity the most.

PORTABLE COMPUTERS

THE GUIDANCE COMPUTERS aboard space capsules were one thing, but it was only a matter of time before NASA wanted to take general-purpose computers into space. Beige boxes with CRT screens were too heavy and cumbersome to be shot into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle, so portable units were explored. This was the 1980s, though, and laptops were somewhat primitive.

In 1982, however, a company called GRiD developed the Compass, a computer that looks recognizably like a laptop. It was powered by an Intel 8086 CPU, with up to 512Kb of nonvolatile magnetic bubble memory (a defunct technology that was very durable, but tended to run a little hot), and things like disk drives available