NASA Space Tech That Landed in the Car You Drive Today

Unless you’re answering a casting call for the next installment in the Fast and Furious franchise or Elon Musk deciding to get rid of another roadster in a novel way, it’s highly unlikely that your automobile will ever make it into space. That doesn’t mean, however, that interplanetary tech hasn’t found its way into your ride’s design. Even the humblest of daily drivers have been touched by the fruits of NASA’s research over the years, with the huge federal investments made in leaving the Earth behind also paying significant dividends in protecting passengers, improving performance, and designing advanced features for the terrestrial craft sitting in your garage.

Your Tire Pressure Sensor Began Life on the Space Shuttle

Making sure your tires are filled to the correct pressure is important for a host of reasons. Low tire pressure can reduce your overall energy efficiency, costing you more at the pump (or charger), while also hurting you in the handling department and causing uneven wear at the outside edges of the tread face. Then there’s the danger of a blowout; under-inflated tires generate more heat as they roll, which in a worst case scenario could lead to the catastrophic separation of a radial’s steel belt and the rubber around it.

Now imagine instead of an SUV or pickup truck, you’re cruising down a stretch of asphalt in a vehicle that weighs 108 tons. Oh, and forget setting the cruise to 65 mph, because you’re coming in hot (literally) at 288 mph. This is the reality faced by the space shuttle nearly every time it came in for a landing.

To help mitigate the force and heat generated by this type of landing under such extreme conditions—which, according to Michelin, represents dropping the equivalent weight of an entire NASCAR qualifying field on the runway—the shuttle relies on extremely high pressures of 373 psi (pounds per square inch) in each of its tires (which are filled with nitrogen).

If any one of the space shuttle’s six tires were to lose pressure during a landing run, the potential to go shiny side down would increase dramatically. Even the most sophisticated testing could only tell NASA so much about how they were reacting to the incredible cold of space and the huge heat imposed by braking on the tarmac, so it partnered with a company called NovaSensor to actually “look” inside its tires and get a live feed of pressures at all times.

The setup made use of a sensor on a chip, a novel concept in the 1990s but one that solved many problems for NASA, including the need to keep the shuttle’s launch weight as low as possible. The system worked by measuring the amount of strain that the nitrogen pressure inside the tire put on the chip’s silicon, which generated a measurable electrical charge that could be interpreted to match the tire’s overall status. An RF transmitter signaled onboard systems if tire pressure began to drop out of a safe range.

Despite its NASA origins, NovaSensor fully intended to find a wider market for the tech, and it was clear that automobiles were a no-brainer. The tire pressure monitoring sensor is a rare example of a shuttle system moving almost directly from space flight to the real world, as only a few tweaks were required to mass-produce tire pressure monitoring sensors. In fact, the original NovaSensor—the P1602—is still on sale today.

Doppler Lidar Works on the Interstate Just as Well as it Does on Mars

Lidar wasn’t invented by NASA—that honor belongs the Theodore Maiman, who built the first prototype at Hughes Research Laboratory back in 1960—but the administration has made significant strides in finding practical applications both on and off our planet.

Lidar works like sonar, only instead of bouncing sound off of nearby objects and measuring the length of time before their waves return to determine distance and position, it uses concentrated light beams (better known as lasers). The advantage of lidar is that it works well across very long distances, without sonar’s need for a dense medium like water.

Starting in the mid-1980s, NASA’s use of nascent GPS technology to help aircraft locate themselves enabled the use of lidar as an aerial mapping technology, especially with regards to topography. Flash-forward to the 2000s, and NASA began experimenting with Doppler lidar, which calculates the changes in a returning light beam as it bounces off a moving object (known as the Doppler effect) as a way to land spacecraft on the Moon and Mars.

Doppler lidar is able to detect speeds of less than 0.1 mph, significantly more accurate than radar (which uses radio waves for a similar purpose). It can also differentiate between one object and another even if they are only a few inches apart, from hundreds of feet away. That’s not just useful when looking for a flat landing spot but also when trying to spot pedestrians and vehicles in the immediate vicinity of a moving vehicle.

Combine this with its very small packaging, and it’s easy to see why lidar sensors have become increasingly common on modern vehicles as part of semi-autonomous driving systems.

Heat Safety Starts in Space

OK, so maybe this piece of tech isn’t in your car specifically—but you’ll find it rolling around an oval every Sunday during the racing season, even if you can’t spot it among the garishly painted, super-sponsored wraps competing for TV time and the podium at the end of 500 laps.

It’s no secret that the space shuttle was exposed to some of the highest temperatures imaginable when re-entering the atmosphere at the end of a mission, with the mercury pushing past 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Not wanting to cook its crew, the shuttle made use of insulating tiles along the bottom that absorb the lion’s share of atmospheric friction. The space shuttle’s thermal protection system (TPS) consisted of tiles and blankets that, together, regulated its temperature when the vessel was on its way home, as well as when its cargo bay was open to the rays of the sun while on a mission in space.

In an unusual case of racing reaching out to NASA, the administration was contacted by NASCAR legend Bobby Allison after he toured Kennedy Space Center in the 1990s and immediately saw the potential for TPS technology to be used on the racing circuit, where cockpit temperatures can rise as high as 160 degrees (especially under a driver’s feet). Partnering with Roger Penske, a longtime innovator in the sport, they began testing TPS blankets on the firewall and floors of stock car racers, cutting temps by more than a third.

Why go with NASA’s TPS instead of a more traditional insulator? One word: weight. Penske was able to achieve the desired level of heat resistance while adding just four pounds to a car’s mass, which is critical in motorsports. The program quickly expanded to a full-on civilian manufacturing effort that saw TPS blankets make their way into race cars in various series around the world.

Shake Shake Shake, Shake Shake Shake, Shake Your Auto

On-road testing is only part of the picture when it comes to certifying a car or truck can handle hundreds of thousands of miles in real-world conditions without falling apart. Car companies make use of an extensive array of equipment that amplifies the stress of the street and pushes past even what off-road conditions have to offer in terms of abuse to certify their models as ready for public consumption.

It wasn’t always this way. Build quality on early automobiles was largely a “screw it together and forget it” affair, as the consumer cycle pushed buyers to trade in their old jalopies for new models every few years. It wasn’t until later that car companies realized they could attract more customers by putting together vehicles that stood the test of time, and to do that required extensive testing of nearly each and every component.

NASA had come to the same conclusions toward the end of the 1950s, when it was designing and building the Vanguard 1 satellite. Given the national pride surrounding space travel at the time, the administration had to guarantee that Vanguard would survive the stress of launch and deployment without rattling itself to pieces. This lead to the development of something called a “vibration table,” an apparatus that could subject a satellite—or anything that was strapped to it—to intense levels of shaking that represents the absolute worst of what it might experience while in normal operation.

This might sound like a tenuous link to automotive testing. After all, the idea of a shake table for vibration testing is universal enough to be divorced from its NASA origins by now, right? In actual fact, the company that made the original machinery used for early satellite tests— Tauscher Engineering and Manufacturing Corporation—is doing the same thing today for a wide range of clients in aerospace, weapons, and automotive. Not only that, but some of the same bearing designs used on the very first vibration tables are also the ones being used by car companies carrying out this testing today.