You have NASA to thank for wireless headphones and vacuum cleaners

Many people see space exploration as a waste of resources. Of course, there is the counterargument that scientific discoveries have an intrinsic cultural value, that space initiatives often push international cooperation, or that the space sector has a crucial technological and economic importance.

But the most effective argument might just be to point to the plethora of everyday items that wouldn’t exist without spatial research. NASA spinoff— a section of the U.S. space agency’s technology transfer program — compiles nearly every commercial technology that originated in U.S. space research. It reveals that no space program has had a greater impact on everyday life than the Apollo lunar missions.