4 Amazing Things NASA Invented, and 4 You Think It Did

NASA's space gear has managed to influence so many other things down here on earth.

NASA is everywhere.

Over the past 50 years, the government space agency has built an awful lot of stuff for, well, space. But with its $17 billion annual budget, it has also done quite a bit of research and development in other areas, and even its space gear managed to influence so many other things down here on earth.

The liquid cooled space clothing worn by lunar astronauts in the '70s has been adapted to help burn-victims. In the '80s, the agency helped develop a lightweight breathing system for firefighters. And more recently, biologists modified the star-tracking algorithms used by the Hubble Telescope to track fish and polar bears. "The list goes on and on, but not many people know about it," says Daniel Lockney, Technology Transfer Program Executive with NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist.

Lockney is the guy you go to if you want access to NASA's space-aged technologies. This week, he and his colleagues released a catalog of about 1,000 NASA software projects, trying to make it easier for the agency's research to trickle down to the rest of us. And in the near future, he plans on launching an online software database and repository that will grease the wheels even more.

He's proud of the work he and his colleagues do, and he loves to talk about NASA's long history. When people learn what Lockney does, they often tell him about their favorite NASA inventions. That's can be fun. But sometimes, it's also a bit of an odd experience. People often name things that weren't actually invented at NASA. "It happens all the time," Lockney says.

So, the images above provide a kind of quiz. There are eight technologies pictured. Four of them came out of NASA's tech transfer program. And four did not. Can you tell the myths from the NASA miracles?