Wheels that don't puncture have been around for centuries
We don't use them because they are more shit than normal tyres for the majority of use cases.
Specific use cases, such as those faced by NASA may benefit from having such a feature, but to say they "invented" wheels that don't puncture is an outright lie.
The Superelastic Tire offers traction equal or superior to conventional pneumatic tires and eliminates both the possibility of puncture failures and running “under-inflated”, thereby improving automobile fuel efficiency and safety. Also, this tire design does not require an inner frame which both simplifies and lightens the tire/wheel assembly.
Except that NASA's new tires are actually better than normal tires in the normal use cases. Hence the word invented. Did you actually read the article before criticising it?
Traction is not the only factor. How does this new tire affect steering? How much noise does it make as it rolls on the ground? How much noise does it make as air flows over it at high speed? How durable is it? How does it handle high rotational speeds? How does it handle impact? How does it handle braking? How does it handle different weather and road conditions, different temperatures? How does it treat the road surface? And can it be manufactured at such huge scales? There are plenty of reasons why it might very well be completely unsuitable as car tires.
At some point we're just getting bogged down in semantics. Someone invented the internal combustion engine, and the earliest versions ran on gaseous fuels. Somebody else "invented" versions that than on liquid fuels. Engines that ran on petrol (gas) and diesel were "invented" by separate people. Engines based on turbine, reciprocating pistons, and rotary mechanisms were all "invented" by separate people.
The degree to which you consider any of those independent "inventions" versus simply modifying and improving existing inventions is essentially arbitrary.
Correct. Tvs are improvements on still images, which themselves are an improvement on pictographs, which are an improvement on transmission of ideas via language.
Wheels that don’t puncture have been around for centuries
What does that have to do with it? Those were a different design. Sure, this invention shares a couple of features with past inventions but that doesn't mean it's the same invention.
Most puncture proof tires are too hard. A good tire is soft enough to have a large flat area where it touches the road (or some other shape, if the road is bumpy).