Dava Newman: Space Exploration, Space Suits, and Life on Mars

Lex Fridman introduces Dava Newman as the Apollo Program Professor at MIT, a former Deputy Administrator of NASA and principal investigator on four spaceflight missions. Her research is in aerospace biomedical engineering, studying human performance in varying gravity environments, and she designed and built spacesuit technology, notably the bio suit discussed in the conversation. Because of scheduling problems on both sides, they had only about 40 minutes. In what he calls true engineering style, Newman told him she talks fast, he should pick the best questions, and they would get it done.

The rest of the opening is the standard sign-off for the show and a sponsor read for Cash App, presented for the first time. Fridman describes Bitcoin purchases through the app and fractional stock investing, and says Cash App will donate to FIRST, the robotics and engineering education organization, when listeners use his promo code. He gives FIRST's reach as over 110 countries, 660,000 students and 300,000 mentors and volunteers, with a perfect Charity Navigator rating.

Fridman opens by noting that Newman has circumnavigated the globe by boat and asks about Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, which was the first to circumnavigate the globe 500 years ago. Magellan died halfway through, as did 242 of the 260 sailors on the three-year journey. He asks whether the crew felt fear or excitement.

Newman thinks it was probably not fear but wonderment, since challenge and the unknown define exploration. She adds that sailing the world's oceans means extreme weather of every kind, and that circumnavigating gave her a new appreciation of the winds and waves. Because Magellan's crew had no three-dimensional map of the Earth and could only look over the horizon and wonder what was there, she argues that team dynamics and leadership had to be especially important.

She links this to space. Keeping people focused on the mission is a central problem, and Newman, who specializes in keeping astronauts alive, says psychosocial issues, team dynamics and leadership are among the top three impacts in any isolated, confined environment and in any extreme mission, including a Mars mission, where technology is only one set of challenges.

Asked when she fell in love with exploration, Newman says it goes back as far as she can remember. She grew up in Helena, Montana, in the Rocky Mountains, where Mount Helena was effectively her backyard, and spent her early years running around, looking at caves and being in nature. She agrees with Fridman that exploration is not limited to a domain, and says she holds an all-encompassing definition of it.

On space, she says it is a good year to ask, since it is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and she was five years old at the time. She remembers Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins in orbit doing something that had seemed impossible a decade or even a year earlier. For her the Apollo program taught her to dream: any impossible mission can become possible with enough focus, leadership and some luck. From then on it seemed obvious that people should be interplanetary.

She notes that this was not obvious to her before people reached the moon. Once they did, it became clear to her that this is what astronauts do: they explore, go into space, and land on other planets or moons.