> What kinds of developments could not have been done with autonomous payloads? This is very much the wrong question to ask. The question isn't whether somethi

> What kinds of developments could not have been done with autonomous payloads? This is very much the wrong question to ask. The question isn't whether something can be done with different payloads. The question is whether something would have been done if not for the drive to send people into constrained environments. Closed loop osmotic water filtration systems would not be so developed without the driving motivation of sustaining life in a box. Sending payloads at all is actually extremely tangential except insofar as if you officially terminate the actual sending of people then the motivation to develop technologies that make it easier to send people vanishes. It's not super clear from your wording, but it sounds kinda like you want to hear about research within the past 20 years that has made it to already being commercialized, but that would be ignoring the fact that taking decades for research and development done for human spaceflight to get applied to other uses, which it often does, doesn't negate the facts that it often does take longer than that for ventures to reach the public and that the research and development was done for human spaceflight. It seems unlikely that you're looking for older developments that have only been commercialized recently, though I can point you to several, and developments done more recently but not yet commercialized for other uses have no success record yet. It makes your request sound a bit disingenuous.