NASA's interest in fuel cells arose from the need to power Moon missions. Engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston turned to fuel cells because they offered more energy per pound compared to batteries over long missions. At that time, fuel cells were a theoretical concept, not yet practically applied.
NASA financed three companies, including a division of Pratt and Whitney, to develop prototypes. For the Apollo missions, NASA chose the Pratt and Whitney team, which evolved into UTC Power, to supply all the space shuttle fuel cells. With NASA's funding and guidance, UTC Power eventually transitioned to offering commercial fuel cells. Today, the company operates as HyAxiom Inc., based in the same South Windsor, Connecticut plant that produced the original NASA fuel cells.
HyAxiom introduced its first commercial fuel cell in the mid-1990s, expanding its product line about ten years later.
"The models they built for these products we use today had a lot of the electrochemistry understanding from the space program," said Sridhar Kanuri, HyAxiom's chief technology officer.
Currently, HyAxiom manufactures approximately 120 units annually and anticipates increased production as government investment in fuel cells grows. The U.S. government aims to use fuel cells for energy storage from renewable sources.
John Scott, NASA's principal technologist for power and energy storage, noted, "All these companies trace their intellectual property heritage, their corporate heritage, even the generations of personnel to those companies NASA funded back in the early 1960s."
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