Dava Newman: Space Exploration, Space Suits, and Life on Mars | Lex Fridman Podcast #51

The following is a conversation with David Newman. She's the Apollo Program professor at MIT and the former Deputy Administrator of NASA, and has been a principal investigator on four spaceflight missions. Her research interests are in aerospace, biomedical engineering, investigating human performance in varying gravity environments. She has designed and engineered and built some incredible spacesuit technology, namely the biosuit that we talk about in this conversation. Due to some scheduling challenges on both our parts, we only had about 40 minutes together and in true engineering style, she said, I talk fast, you pick the best questions. Let's get it done. And we did. It was a fascinating conversation about space exploration and the future of spacesuits. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple, podcast support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter lexfriedman spelled F R I D M A N For the first time, this show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. Cash App is the easiest way to send money to your friends and it is also the easiest way to buy, sell and deposit Bitcoin. Most bitcoin exchanges take days for bank transfer to become investable through Cash App. It takes seconds. Invest as little as $1 and now you own Bitcoin. I have several conversations about Bitcoin coming up on this podcast. Decentralized digital currency is a fascinating technology in general to explore, both at the technical and the philosophical level. Cash App is also the easiest way to try and grow your money with their new investing feature. Unlike investing tools that force you to buy entire shares of stock and Cash App amazingly lets you instantly invest as little or as much as you want. Some stocks in the market are hundreds if not thousands of dollars per share and now you can still own a piece with as little as $1. Brokerage services are provided by Cash App Investing, a subsidiary of Square and member sipc. I'm also excited to be working with Cash App to support one of my favorite organizations called first, which is best known for their First Robotics and Lego competitions that seeks to inspire young students in engineering and technology fields all over the world. That's over 110 countries, 660,000 students, 300,000 mentors and volunteers, and a perfect rating on Charity Navigator, which means the donated money is used to maximum effectiveness. When you sign up for Cash App and use the promo code lexpodcast, you'll instantly receive $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an amazing organization that I've personally seen inspire girls and boys to Learn to explore and to dream of engineering a better world. Don't forget to use the code lexpodcast when you download Cash app from the App Store or Google Play store today. And now here's my conversation with Deva Newman. You circumnavigated the globe on boat. So let's look back in history. Five hundred years ago, Ferdinand Magellan's crew was first to circumnavigate the globe. But he died, I think people don't know like halfway through. And so did 242 of the 260 sailors that took that three year journey. What do you think it was like for that crew at that time heading out into the unknown to face the probably likely death? Do you think they were filled with fear, with excitement?

Probably not fear. I think in all of exploration, the challenge and the unknown. So probably wonderment. And then just the. When you really are sailing the world's oceans, you have extreme weather of all kinds. When we were circumnavigating it was challenging, new dynamic. You really appreciate mother Earth, you appreciate the winds and the waves. So back to Magellan and his crew since they really didn't have a three dimensional map of the globe of the Earth when they went out just probably looking over the horizon thinking what's there? What's there? So I would say that the challenge had to be really important in terms of the team dynamics and that leadership had to be incredibly important. Team dynamics, how do you keep people focused on the mission?

So you think the psychology that's interesting, there's probably echoes of that in the space exploration stuff we'll talk about. So the psychology of the dynamics between the human beings on the mission is important?

Absolutely. For a Mars mission it's. There's lots of challenges, technology but you know, since I specialize in keeping my astronauts alive, the psychosocial issues, the psychology of psychosocial team dynamics, leadership, that's, you know, we're all people. So that's going to be, that's a. Always a huge impact. One of the top three, I think of any isolated confined environment and can any mission that is really pretty extreme.

So your Twitter handle is devaexplorer. So when did you first fall in love with the idea of exploration?

Ah, that's a great question. Maybe as long as I can remember as I grew up in Montana in the Rocky Mountains and Helena the capital. And so literally Mount Helena was my backyard was right up there. So exploring, being in the mountains, looking at caves, just running around, but always being in nature. So since My earliest memories, I think of myself as kind of exploring the natural beauty of the Rocky Mountains where I grew up.

So exploration is not limited to any domain, it's just anything. So the natural domain of any kind, going out to the woods into a place you haven't been, it's all exploration?

I think. So, yeah, I have a pretty all encompassing definition of exploration.

So what about space exploration? When were you first captivated by the idea that we little humans could venture out into the space, into the great unknown of space?

So it's a great year to talk about that. The 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. As I was alive during Apollo, and specifically Apollo 11, I was five years old and I distinctly remember that. I remember that humanity. I'm sure I probably didn't know their names at the time. You know, there's Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and never forget Michael Collins in orbit. You know, those three men, you know, doing something that just seemed impossible. Seemed impossible a decade earlier, even a year earlier. But so the Apollo program really inspired me. And then I think it actually just taught me to dream to any impossible mission could be possible with enough focus. And I'm sure you need some luck, but you definitely need the leadership, you need the focus of the mission. So since an early age, I thought, of course, people should be interplanetary. Of course, people. We need people on Earth and we're going to have people exploring space as well.

So that seemed obvious, you know, at that age.

Of course, it opened it up before we saw men on the moon. It wasn't obvious to me at all. But once we understood that, yes, absolutely, astronauts, that's what they do. They explore, they go into space and they land on other planets or moons.

So again, maybe a romanticized philosophical question, but when you look up at the stars, knowing that there's at least 100 billion of them in the Milky Way galaxy, right? So we're really a small speck in this giant thing that's the visible universe. How does that make you feel about our efforts here?

I love the perspective. I love that perspective. I always open my public talks with the big Hubble Space Telescope. I mentioned looking out until you mentioned just now the solar system, the Milky Way. Cause I really, I think it's really important to know that we're just a small pale blue dot. We're really fortunate. We're on the best planet by far. Life is fantastic.

That we know of. You're confident this is the best planet?

I'm pretty sure it's the best planet. The best planet that we know of. I mean I searched my researches, you know, in mission worlds. And when will we find life? I think actually in probably the next decade we find probably past life, probably the evidence of past life on Mars.

Let's say you think there was once life on Mars or you think there's.

Currently I'm more comfortable saying probably 3.5 billion years ago. Feel pretty confident there was life on Mars just because then it had an electromagnetic shield, it had an atmosphere, has a wonderful Gravity Level 3 HG is fantastic. You know, you're all super human. We can all slam dunk a basketball. I mean it's going to be fun to play sports on Mars. But so I think we'll find past the fossilized, probably the evidence of past life on Mars. Currently that's again, we need the next decade. But the evidence is mounting for sure. We do have the organics. We're finding organics. We have, have water, seasonal water on Mars. We used to just know about the ice caps, you know, north and south pole. Now we have seasonal water. We do have the building blocks for life on Mars. We really need to dig down into the soil because everything on the top surface is radiated. But once we find down, will we see any life forms? Will we see any bugs? I leave it open as a possibility, but I feel pretty certain that pattern.