NASA's FDA-approved ventilator will be licensed to manufacturers for free

Developed in a record 37-day period, the new FDA-approved ventilator goes by the name of VITAL or Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally.

It has been tested on a "high fidelity human patient simulator" and is now being moved into manufacturing, with the end goal to free up the limited supply of traditional ventilators so that they could be used on more critical COVID-19 cases.

NASA says VITAL can be built faster and maintained more easily than traditional ventilators.

It requires fewer components to be produced and can also be easily modified to be used in field hospitals being set up in convention centers, hotels, and other high-capacity facilities across the country.

However, its life-span is three months and will not therefore replace traditional ventilators built to last years.

Now, NASA is looking to partner with the commercial medical industry to get VITAL manufactured and is offering a royalty-free license for the same.

"We are working to pass the baton to the medical community, and ultimately patients, as quickly as possible," said Fred Farina, Chief Innovation and Corporate Partnerships Officer at Caltech, which manages Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA.

From leading automakers like Tesla, GM, and Ford in the US to Maruti Suzuki and ISRO in India, leading technology players in the industry have been coming forward to tackle the shortage of ventilators, which has surfaced as a major problem during the COVID-19 crisis.

So far, the pandemic has killed more than 2.3 lakh and sickened as many as 32 lakh worldwide.