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How the Space Program Has Influenced What We Carry
by Mike Knispel | Carryology Editor-in-Chief, June 14, 2026
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Would you be surprised if I told you if I told you many of the things you carry today, were once invented or intended for outside our atmosphere?
The memory foam that cushions your shoulders. The reflective lining in your emergency blanket. The insulation in your puffy jacket. The lens coating on your sunglasses. The pen clipped to your notebook. The camera in your phone.
There’s a reasonable chance that every single one of those things traces a line back to a problem someone was trying to solve in space.
Not in a vague, inspirational sense. In a specific, documented, patent-licensed, government-contracted sense. The space program has a technology transfer office. It publishes an annual report called Spinoff. It has been cataloguing the journey of space-born technologies into everyday life since 1976. The trail is there, if you know where to look.
But the trail is also messier, more human, and more interesting than the clean origin stories usually told about it. Some of these technologies were invented by NASA. Some were invented for NASA, by private individuals who then knocked on the agency’s door. Some were invented by NASA-funded contractors who spun off into commercial companies. And some were invented by people who had nothing to do with space at all, but whose work was quietly accelerated, validated, or transformed by the demands of getting humans off this planet and keeping them alive up there.
This is a story about very specific kinds of problems — extreme ones — and what happens when the solutions to those problems escape their original context and find new ones.
Here are five of them.
The Gold Foil That Became Your Emergency Blanket
In the mid-1960s, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, had a temperature problem. In low Earth orbit, a spacecraft in direct sunlight can reach temperatures above 120°C. In shadow, it can plunge to -160°C. Sometimes within the same orbit. The spacecraft needed to survive both extremes, and it needed to do so without adding meaningful weight.
The solution was a material called multi-layer insulation, or MLI — a composite of extremely thin plastic films, each coated with a vacuum-deposited metallic layer, crinkled and layered so that the gaps between them prevented heat conduction while the reflective surfaces bounced radiated heat away. The material was, by weight, almost nothing. By performance, it was extraordinary. It reflected up to 97% of radiated heat. You’ve seen it on every spacecraft photograph ever taken — that iconic gold and silver foil wrapping the Apollo Lunar Module, the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb. That’s MLI.
Astronaut John Grunsfeld works on repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, including replacing three thermal blankets. Credit: NASA
The technology migrated to Earth in stages. When a longtime NASA supplier of the insulation shut down in the early 1980s, one of its former employees founded a company called Advanced Flexible Materials Inc. and created a brand called Heatsheets — the crinkly, silver emergency blankets now handed out at every marathon finish line, stuffed into every trail runner’s vest, packed into every survival kit. The material is identical in principle to what wrapped the Apollo spacecraft. The application is radically different. The physics are the same.
A note on the record states that NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center developed the material “in 1964.” The NASA Spinoff database confirms Marshall’s role in commissioning the original superinsulation for spacesuits, spacecraft, and cryogenic tanks during the Moon program era. The precise year of 1964 is consistent with the timeline of the Apollo program’s thermal protection development, though NASA’s own published materials describe...