Newman, Dava

Apollo Program Professor at MIT; former NASA Deputy Administrator; spacesuit researcher and designer of the "BioSuit"

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

Lex Fridman Podcast · Nov 22, 2019

• Dava Newman
• NASA
• Artemis program
• Mars exploration
• mechanical counter-pressure spacesuit
• BioSuit
• CubeSats
• reusable rockets
• autonomous space systems
• climate change and Earth observation

Core ideas

Newman frames exploration as a continuous human impulse rather than something unique to space, tracing her own fascination back to childhood in the Montana Rockies and connecting it to historical maritime exploration (invoking Magellan's circumnavigation, where 242 of 260 crew died) as a template for thinking about the psychosocial dynamics — team cohesion, leadership, focus — that she considers just as critical to a Mars mission's success as any technology, since keeping isolated, confined crews functioning as a team is, in her assessment, one of the top challenges of any extreme long-duration mission. She expresses confidence that evidence of past microbial life will likely be found on Mars within the next decade, citing mounting evidence (organics, seasonal water beyond the known polar ice caps, and Mars's ancient magnetic shield and atmosphere roughly 3.5 billion years ago) while noting current-day life would require digging beneath the radiation-scoured surface to check; she distinguishes this near-term optimism about microbial life from her far more uncertain view on intelligent life elsewhere, which she personally hopes exists but says lacks any current scientific evidence, given how astronomically distant even the ~6,000 known exoplanets (including a couple dozen "Goldilocks zone" Earth-like candidates) are — tens to thousands of light-years away.

On the current era of space exploration, Newman lays out a three-phase framework: humanity has spent roughly 40 years mastering low-Earth orbit, is now returning to the Moon (with the Artemis program) as a three-day-away technological proving ground for habitats, life-support systems, suits, and in-situ resource utilization (particularly extracting water ice from permanently shadowed polar craters like Shackleton for fuel and life support), before using those lessons for a human Mars mission she targets for the 2030s. She argues this sequencing is deliberate and necessary — the Moon lets NASA "buy down" technological risk before committing to a mission where Mars's distance (eight months each way, with no real-time Earth communication) makes full crew and system autonomy mandatory, comparing this necessity directly to Magellan's crew, who likewise had to operate as a fully autonomous unit once they left port. She is enthusiastic about the "democratization" of spaceflight driven by newly diverse heavy-lift launch capability (NASA's Space Launch System alongside SpaceX and Blue Origin) and by CubeSats — modular, shoebox-sized small satellites affordable enough for any nation or even student teams to fly, which she credits with transforming Earth observation, climate monitoring, and telecommunications by replacing a handful of expensive dedicated satellites with large, cheap, redundant constellations. She frames public-private partnerships (SpaceX and Blue Origin funded substantially through NASA and Air Force contracts) as combining industry's higher risk tolerance and speed with government's institutional caution and safety rigor — noting NASA itself once gave an internal award for "failing smart" — and calls reusable rocket landings (recovering ~70% of launch costs) a genuine game-changer she still finds thrilling to watch, distinct from but building on the Space Shuttle's earlier, more costly reusability.

Newman's core technical contribution, the BioSuit, inverts the traditional spacesuit design paradigm: rather than shrinking an entire pressurized spacecraft (gas-filled, "balloon"-style, like the current ~140 kg suits) around an astronaut, her approach — mechanical counter-pressure — applies the roughly one-third-atmosphere of pressure a human needs to survive directly to the skin via tight-fitting, engineered garment patterning, informed by detailed biomechanical study and modeling of human motion. She argues this "from the skin out" approach could reduce suit mass by an order of magnitude while providing dramatically greater mobility — closer to an "Olympic athlete" than the stiff, energy-wasting mobility of current gas-pressurized suits — with only the helmet remaining gas-pressurized, since there's no benefit to shrink-wrapping the head; she envisions the future helmet functioning as an augmented-reality "information portal" with embedded cameras, mapping, and even basic lab-analysis capability. She stresses that a suit is only one component of a broader "suite of explorers" that will always include rovers and robots working alongside humans, since the explicit goal of a Mars mission is not to remain sheltered inside a lander but to actively search for evidence of life, requiring maximum human mobility on the surface.

On autonomy and AI, Newman distinguishes near-term applications — testing progressively more autonomous systems on the Moon, where a few-second communication delay allows iteration, in preparation for Mars, where the ~20-minute round-trip light delay makes real-time Mission Control intervention impossible and mandates fully autonomous spacecraft and crew — from what she considers AI's most urgent present-day application: analyzing the enormous volume of Earth-observation satellite data (oceans, land, atmosphere) to accelerate understanding of, and behavioral response to, climate change. She states plainly that she does not view Mars as a backup plan or "Option B" for humanity, and that Earth itself does not need humans (it existed long before us and will persist long after), arguing instead that all of humanity must recognize itself collectively as "astronauts of Spaceship Earth" with an urgent, decade-scale mission to live sustainably and in better balance with the planet. Looking further out, she predicts substantial permanent and visiting populations in low-Earth orbit and on the Moon within decades, an eventual human Mars mission in the 2030s, and continued purely robotic/scientific exploration of worlds like Venus and Jupiter's moons that remain physically inhospitable to sustained human presence — with humans "living there in our minds" through the data and images those probes return.

Excerpts