Above the Clouds: Stories from the Boardroom
Oct 21, 2026 · 1 hr 19 min · 11 segments
Kris Lehnhardt is the Director of Space Medicine at UTHealth Houston. He spent six years leading the science behind NASA’s medical systems for deep space exploration, and now runs Exploration Health…
Kris LehnhardtGuest
Richard ByrdHost
One of the things that you, that we talked about in our earlier calls was, you know, in, uh, was, and you mentioned it too about the, all the technology-
But then there's a lot of commercial applications for those things down earth, and you, you, you called it a two-sided coin.
Walk us through your thoughts on it 'cause I thought that was really fascinating.
A lot of folks who don't get what we do in space, they don't realize what that potential is.
And so if you think about our world today and you think about some of the technologies that we rely on on a regular basis, many of them either started as spaceflight technologies or were adapted or improved for spaceflight.
So some of the key examples that people hear people talking about all the time are the Apollo flight computer was essentially the very first time that we miniaturized a computer small enough to get into a spacecraft.
It was work done by companies and universities to create that computer, and without it, our entire microchip industry may not exist today.
So everything we have from a computing perspective started from a drive to make computers as small as possible for spaceflight 'cause prior to that, computers just filled rooms.
The other one that I think is really fascinating is the cameras in all of our phones today are based upon cameras that were used-
So every time we think about how to s- solve a really hard space problem, the technology or the solution that we generate almost always has an Earth application.
One of the things that you, that we talked about in our earlier calls was, you know, in, uh, was, and you mentioned it too about the, all the technology-
But then there's a lot of commercial applications for those things down earth, and you, you, you called it a two-sided coin.
Walk us through your thoughts on it 'cause I thought that was really fascinating.
A lot of folks who don't get what we do in space, they don't realize what that potential is.
And so if you think about our world today and you think about some of the technologies that we rely on on a regular basis, many of them either started as spaceflight technologies or were adapted or improved for spaceflight.
So some of the key examples that people hear people talking about all the time are the Apollo flight computer was essentially the very first time that we miniaturized a computer small enough to get into a spacecraft.
It was work done by companies and universities to create that computer, and without it, our entire microchip industry may not exist today.
So everything we have from a computing perspective started from a drive to make computers as small as possible for spaceflight 'cause prior to that, computers just filled rooms.
The other one that I think is really fascinating is the cameras in all of our phones today are based upon cameras that were used-
So every time we think about how to s- solve a really hard space problem, the technology or the solution that we generate almost always has an Earth application.
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