The World's Smallest Spaceship

How does studying a giraffe help make a better space suit? Dr. Dava Newman is the current Director of the MIT Media Lab and served as a Deputy Administrator of NASA in the mid-2010s. She’s been with MIT’s School of Engineering since 1993, where she ponders questions like how giraffes avoid passing out lifting their little heads up to munch on some trees, and uses these findings to lead a team of innovators creating the MIT BioSuit, which is a completely new approach to a long-standing challenge in aerospace, namely how to keep a human body pressurized at high altitudes or in space, where pressure is absent. A BioSuit is currently on display at The Museum of Flight in our temporary exhibit, “Stranger Than Fiction: The Incredible Science of Aerospace Medicine.” Dr. Newman joins host Sean Mobley to talk about giraffes, and other inspirations from nature, about the BioSuit, and about how imagination and creative thinking dwell at the core of science and engineering.

Full transcript and shownotes after the player.

Link to become a donor. Your gift helps keep this show going!

Link to Dava Newman’s website. Find more information on Dr. Newman and her work at her webpage.

Link to “Stranger Than Fiction” webpage. “Stranger Than Fiction: The Incredible Science of Aerospace Medicine” features the MIT BioSuit, and runs through February 6, 2022.

Link to “Suited for Space” program. This education program for 5^th – 8^th graders introduces learners to concepts including pressure, human-centered design, history, and more.

Transcript:

SEAN MOBLEY:       Hello, and welcome to The Flight Deck, the Podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I am your host, Sean Mobley. How does studying a giraffe help make a better space suit? Dr. Dava Newman is the current director of the MIT Media Lab and served as a deputy administrator at NASA in the mid-2010s. She’s been with MIT’s School of Engineering since 1993, where she ponders questions like, how do giraffes keep from passing out while lifting their little heads up to munch on some trees? And uses these findings to lead a team of innovators in creating the MIT Bio-Suit—which is a pretty new approach to a long-standing challenge in aerospace; namely, how to keep a human body pressurized at high altitudes or in space where pressure is absent? A bio-suit is currently on display at the Museum of Flight in our temporary exhibit, Stranger Than Fiction—The Incredible Science of Aerospace Medicine. Dr. Newman and I talked about giraffes and other inspirations from nature, about the bio-suit itself, and about how imagination and creative thinking are well at the core of science and engineering.

SM:     Just to start off, the bio-suit, for those who might not be familiar with it, can you just give a brief summary of what it is?

00:01:55

DN:     A bio-suit is an advanced space suit concept. Let me start with conventional space suits, or EVA—Extra Vehicular Activity. When we sent astronauts into space, into the vacuum of space, or when we get to the moon and mars, we have to protect them; we have to keep them alive. So we need a pressured shell around them and we need to provide life support. So, conventionally, we do that when you see the astronauts in their space suits with ethos gas pressurized shell. So I call it the world’s smallest spacecraft. That’s the best way to think about it, the world’s smallest spacecraft, because you have to design and build all the same systems you do in your spacecraft and you shrink it around the body. So it’s really a marvel; a marvel of engineering to get that space suit wrapped around the person. But if you’ve seen the conventional space suits, their gas pressures, they’re very heavy—they’re very massive—and they’re not very mobile. So let’s flip the paradigm; we have the same goal—to keep the astronaut alive—but for the bio-suit, it’s a pressure-providing layer, if you will, so rather than putting you in a balloon, can I put the pressure directly on your skin to keep you alive; we have to put a third of an atmosphere of pressure. That keeps someone alive in a vacuum.

So, rather than being in a balloon, we said, wait a minute. With materials and different patterning, is it possible to literally design a second-skin suit to pressurize you; to put that through the material properties and design; we’re going to pressurize your skin and, if we can do that, this second-skin concept, you can be very mobile. First, it’s an order of magnitude less in terms of mass, so a lightweight, mobile suit is what you should think about for the bio-suit, so that’s called mechanical counter-pressure; we’re pressuring on the skin rather than putting you in a balloon, is the concept.

SM:     Yeah, and it’s so visually striking. We have one on display in our temporary exhibit, Stranger Than Fiction, but whether people see it in the exhibit or in photos, it just looks so futuristic and cool. It’s just a neat design.

DN:     Well, thank you. And that’s a back-to-the-future, right? And that’s really because of the team that we—I’m an aerospace engineer, myself, but guess what? We have designers, architects. So on our team, aesthetics and designing for humans, we want it to be a beautiful aesthetic; also very useful. So it really is kind of the team, I think, of folks who you bring to the table. So we have a high priority on design, mobility, as well as getting all the engineering systems right. So it’s kind of the technology and design where they cross and it’s customized—that’s very important—everyone doesn’t get the same suit. We have the technology, I can give you a scan, a 3D scan of your body in 30 seconds so, since we have the technology, let’s use it.

00:04:42

And so we use it to think about the customization. That’s why, well, there’s, you know, men and women, and everyone so, you know, that’s why you’d look at it and say, well, this looks very different. It doesn’t look like the Michelin Man. It looks like a form-fitting suit and that’s exactly it. We want everyone to have a kind of custom, form-fitting capability because, at the end of the day, we just want explorers, astronauts that say, when we get to the moon; really, when we get people to mars, you’re not going there to sit around in your habitat, you’re going there to explore. So, to me, the idea is empowering them, fantastic—we just had the Olympics. It’s like trying to make the astronauts and explorers like elite Olympic athletes so they have to have the right gear; they have to have the right suit to gain all the mobility. You don’t want to waste your energy fighting the suit; bending the arms against the gas pressure. What you want to do is put all of your energy into exploring and, explicitly, we’re searching for life on mars so there’s a lot of exploring to do; a lot of science to do.

00:05:41

SM:     Yeah, astronauts talk about how exhausting it is to do an extra-vehicular activity, or what we would call a spacewalk. And it’s largely fighting against the suit.

DN:     That’s right; that’s exactly—currently, where the majority of your energy is wasted because you are fighting the suit. So, again, we kind of flipped the design paradigm and said, okay, how can I design a system where the majority of your energy goes into useful work? And if we have the form-fitting suit, then that’s really important because we don’t want to waste energy; we want to enable the mobility and it’s a life-support system; very, very important, you know, on the backpack. The backpack of the suit has to provide all of your oxygen; has to scrub out your carbon dioxide; has to have thermal control. The layers can do that as well, you know, the suit can—the thermal control—but you’re, again—a big life support system. And, again, we just kind of say, well, let’s have a mobile, smaller system, compact. I get a lot of inspiration from, say, diving; from, Olympic athletes; from extreme folks who—camping. We kind of see and take all those good ideas and say, okay, this is how we should enable space exploration; you know, astronauts of the future when we’re planetary explorers.

SM:     So, speaking of diving, we’re big fans of Wiley Post around here and, like, early, early designs. How does this build on kind of his history of trying to surmount this problem? I know, for example, you based specifically—and worked with—Dr. Paul Webb. What does the bio-suit do? What did you overcome that Dr. Webb was not able to in his earlier work? He was way ahead of the curve.

00:07:26

DN:     Way ahead. And back to Wiley Post, too. Those were the images that I grew up with and we all did and we want to now say, you know, 56 years later I think we’re finally getting there. To Paul Webb—Dr. Webb came up with the very first mechanical counter-pressure suit prototype. It was called The Space Activity System. And so he had the crazy idea, what if we put the pressure directly on the skin? He was a physiologist and so he was thinking about that. How do we put the pressure on the skin? He didn’t have the materials that we have today so that’s the big step for us—the big game changers. Now we can, you know, design our own material so he was really ahead of the concept and, essentially, I want to also give credit to Dr. Iberall who was another inspiration for the bio-suit. Dr. Iberall was thinking much more about the topography of skin; these lines of non-extension, I can get the patterning right. And if I get the patterning right on a pressure garment, then I can give you maximum mobility.

00:08:27

So Dr. Paul Webb, thinking the first person to really articulate maybe we can pressurize directly on the skin and Dr. Iberall saying, there’s something that’s key about the patterning. So essentially, I took both of those ideas. I thought they were great ideas, just well before their time, to say, let’s think about pressurizing directly on the skin—the mechanical counter-pressure—and then if I think about this and am really smart, maybe I can do the patterning. And it’s three-dimensional mathematics; a three-dimensional Ivan Vector Analysis—say that twice—but it’s really, you know, humans have very complicated shapes and we want to get mobility so we really have to, again, design in three dimensions and then that’s how we can give someone—kind of maximize their mobility—if their suit, if their clothing, is really custom fit to them. And I guess, you know, the 100 million dollar question is, is it biologically relevant? Now, from our patterning and the pressure, does that have anything to do with the collagen in skin? Is that really how skin is perhaps made? I still don’t know the question [sic] to that yet, but it’s very intriguing from my engineering perspective, coming up with the systems; you know, the suits of the future but also the biological relevance of that, because I don’t know—I do learn everything from nature, right? I feel like nature has already designed so many of these incredible systems—that we have a lot to learn from that and so, as an aerospace engineer, I laugh and say, well, we’re sure learning a lot about skin, that’s for sure.

SM:     Tell me a little bit about that; I’m curious? You learn a lot from nature—what inspires you in that way?

DN:     Oh, well, I love all living things and to watch them—and so maybe a great example is when I was writing an early proposal for the bio-suit, you know, the Masser Advanced Institute concepts—they say, you can’t give us an idea unless, you know, unless it’s 10 years out. Meaning that if the—you know, so we thought—I thought, okay, this is 10 years out, you know. Shrink wrapping the astronauts to send them to mars. That’s definitely the technology we need to develop is more than 10 years. And so I thought about giraffes and, well, simply giraffes kind of come with their own G-suit. Now, what do I mean by that? It’s very interesting if you look at giraffes. A few people have studied this so imagine a giraffe—five meters—you know, a big giraffe; or four meters. I mean, this is a huge creature, right? And it has its head down and it’s eating its greenery; it puts its head up to the top of the trees—why doesn’t it faint, right? We jump out of bed in the morning and jump out a few feet, half a meter, and we almost faint.

00:10:57

SM:     No kidding.

DN:     So it turns—I said, so how does a giraffe do that? Well, it has a small head; has huge musculature and cardiovascular, so imagine that giraffe heart and its head is down, eating, happily on the ground and it wants to pick off the nice things at the top of the trees. And it basically constricts its musculature in its neck—and that’s a very, very long neck, right? And it just puts that blood right to the head so that the giraffe doesn’t faint. Now, it’s a simple description of it but that’s fantastic. So there’s the physiology aspect of it, is how does the, you know, the giraffe’s system do that? And then if we take that back to things I care about, like keeping astronauts alive, or a pilot—a pilot going through high Gs, we have G-suits.

00:11:40

What we’re trying to do, then, is maneuver—we want to get the blood to the pilot’s head when they’re flying, you know, in this sense, a fighter aircraft, to do really amazing maneuvering—you want to make sure that that blood stays in the head of your pilot, right? An acrobatic pilot or a fighter pilot. And same thing—that’s just one example to say, well, if I’m going to design a suit or a system to help someone—and in this sense, a pilot—then we better look at nature. Well, where in nature does—who in nature does this really well? And it comes when you think about the G-suit; I think the giraffe has a pretty amazing biological design and capability.

SM:     That’s really—that’s really interesting. I mean, and it hits on something that I think is very important, of looking beyond our world of aerospace for things. Like, recently, we did some work for our preschool programs called STEM Starters where they actually walked around the outside of the museum and looked at plants and things like that and, you know, sometimes I hear critiques—not of that program specifically, but people say, you know, stick to the plane; stick to the spaceship; and I think they just forget that these do not exist in a vacuum; even beyond inspiration, aircraft and spacecraft interact physically with the environment around them, too. It’s all very connected.

DN:     Absolutely. And just because, you know, for goodness sakes, the Flight Museum has all those beautiful aircraft but, the first thing when I see an aircraft, especially a sleek one—what do you think of? I think of a bird; I think of nature; I think, for goodness sakes, you know. So essentially it is biology. How does a bird fly? And how many types of birds? So every day I have to say, I look at birds and various birds, if I get the chance to glimpse into nature, and think about their control and then figure out, yeah, that’s—you know, these changing, let’s call them, morphing, aircraft wings of the future. That’s surely where we’re going so that they can behave more like a lot of biological systems, because then we get performance advantages. So, yeah, I think that they’re very linked—and especially to kids and young folks out there. I’m just always amazed that—kids are so beautiful, why? Why, why, why this? You know, why is it built like this? Why does it crawl like this? Why does it fly like this? And those are all the questions that we still—and we have to keep that curiosity. And those are all the questions we still ask—I ask every day—to inspire my work.

00:14:16

SM:     So looking at the bio-suits, it looks so different than what we expect from a space suit and I wonder, like, what is the role of something like imagination in developing that? Because it’s not an iteration of the current suit; it’s really a completely different approach and we’ve spent the last, over 50 years, kind of with one approach. What role does imagination have in engineering? We stereotype engineers and scientists as very literal thinkers, but I imagine—I imagine—it really takes a lot of kind of abstract thought and creativity to come up with a solution like that.

DN:     It does. And as engineers, we’re taught—we’re very analytical and usually look to get a solution and go through kind of a linear process, but I like to, you know, have to go back to the team, if we’re trying to develop a new capability—you know, a new spacesuit—to try to look at it methodically and the first question is, what could we do different, you know? Why—yeah, so questioning—does it always have to be a gas-pressurized system? No, I don’t think so.

00:15:18

And you have to obey physics so I can’t have, you know, science fiction, literally, but if it’s technically feasible—and that’s what we’ve learned in the bio-suit—is it technically feasible? And then to your point, it really has to be a multi-disciplinary team. So I need the designers; of course I need the mathematician; engineers—but, you know, some of the best folks I can put on my team, are the artists; the folks who question and say—and then I mean, you know, some medical people because we’re thinking about suits for astronauts but really the earth implications and kind of the dual use—if we can think about, what about suits to help people with mobility here on earth? So it really, just necessarily, brings together a team from very, very different disciplines to—especially at the early stage, the brainstorming; when we’re just—and we need artists, literally; the sketching; the designs. So say rather than the big gas-pressurized suit, what else could it look like? Well, then you would go to build it, how about a skintight—what about one of the most beautiful images I had in my mind, thinking early about the bio-suit, was different colors and taking someone literally and putting them into a vat of liquid and coming out with a skin—you know, inspired by, I think, Elastic Girl, you know, things like this. But that’s—you have to start with that creativity, that curiosity because then you’ll get new concepts and new ideas and, when I like to do brainstorming, I think we need 10 new concepts for suits. What are 10 new concepts? And then as you go down and then do the math and ask, is it physically real? What could we actually design and build? Then, you’ll get to an iterative design but, initially, I think you just throw all kinds of crazy, wonderful ideas on the table because they make you think orthogonally; they make you actually get out of your comfort zone and they make you—and I think in the end, they have the potential to actually, you know, come up with a much better, a much more elegant solution.

00:17:15

SM:     So, what excites you about this suit and its future possibilities? What’s kind of the most exciting prospect for you right now?

DN:     Well, we’re putting in some new advanced materials. One thing with a space suit, some of the challenges are you have to—we call it donning and doffing—putting it on, taking it off. So as we think about that, that’s not trivial. That actually takes a lot—you want a tight-fitting suit and can I put it on and kind of shrink wrap it to get my desired pressure. I mentioned we’re going to a third of an atmosphere—that’s a third of pascals—so we’re working on some really interesting materials. Something called a shaped memory polymer; we’ve used shape memory alloys; kind of think of as smart zippers, if you will. I put on the suit; it’s tight; but now I can cinch it up. So that’s a really exciting area for us right now, kind of incorporating some of these active materials into our current suits.

00:18:07

Another thing that we really want to pay attention to going forward, is more on the life-support system; the backpack. We’ve really specialized in the suit and the pressure-producing suit, but now are thinking about—back to my analogy to the whole spacecraft system—we’re doing some thermal modeling, thermal control, looking at the extremes of the moon and mars and, again, how do we keep people alive and well and happy? And so more work on the life support systems is also on the drawing board right now. And what excites me is becoming interplanetary; getting people to mars, finding life on mars. And I always say, it’s a roundtrip. People are going to really want to come back home and visit their families, so, but really enabling exploration and the future—and hopefully some of our—because we’re researchers.

So hopefully some of our designs and concepts will make it into the real system—the real fielded systems; the real flight systems, which we don’t have now. But those real flight systems, I hope, that we can push and say, um, what about a hybrid suit? What about something that’s very tight-fitting that really helps with mobility and is a very lightweight system? Then, if we can do that, I would call that success.

SM:     Why do all this? Why spend all this money and energy creating suits and going to mars and going to the moon? It’s a question that you’ll hear a lot; I’m sure you do.

DN:     It is. I do. And my answer is that, you know, the inspiration; the dream; it really forces us all to come together; it’s going to be global. So, you know, going beyond the horizon—literally the horizon, the space horizon—but I always come back to all of our exploring, our scientific exploration of the solar system, the exoplanets, our scientific exploration of mars, finding evidence of past life on mars—let’s bring it back to earth. I always say that all of our work, actually, in space, we have to go full circle and think about, okay, I’m an engineer developing technologies—what are those technologies good here for the benefit of humanity? And so I mentioned in terms of the suit designs, it’s really about mobility; about compression; so there’s many medical pathologies and diseases that we also—we always do dual use.

00:20:19

So, not the bio-suit, but I have a counter-measure suit, a skin suit, that one right now we’re really thinking about what are the uses of compression for some pathologies on earth—lymphedema is one right now; and mobility diseases. I can’t cure those diseases, but can we use our technologies for potential suits or capabilities? You know, kind of locomotion-enhancing capabilities and compression here on earth, so it’s a great question. We always have to be kind of centered on earth. I think inspiration and the dream is, you know, thinking about the exploration and getting to mars, but we’re very grounded in terms of, if we get it right, and we have technological breakthroughs, then, how does that really impact folks here on earth?

00:21:03

SM:     Well, Dr. Newman, thank you so much for your time and good luck to you and your team as you continue designing the world’s smallest space suit.

DN:     Absolutely, absolutely. My last shout out to anyone listening is, you know, make sure to dream, dream, dream and we do turn—I love the exhibit at The Flight Museum because Stranger Than Fiction—that’s my job every day. I get to work on these amazing systems. And it is stranger than fiction; it’s our reality. But it just starts with opening it up to dreaming and thinking anything is possible.

SEAN MOBLEY:       Thank you for tuning into this episode of The Flight Deck—the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. Thank you especially to our donors—those who’ve been able to give financial support to the podcast. You make this show happen. If you’d like to become a donor, head to museumofflight.org/podcast and click the yellow “donate” button. Another way to support the show is to just write us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you downloaded us from or just sharing the show out on social media, with people who you think might find it interesting. If you want to see the bio-suit in person, it’s on display at the Museum of Flight alongside some other really cool objects related to high altitudes and space exploration, in our temporary exhibit, Stranger Than Fiction—the Incredible Science of Aerospace Medicine, which runs through February 6^th. Information is in the Show Notes, or at museumofflight.org/podcast. If you’re interested in pressure suits, check out our education program called, Suited for Space, which is all about pressure and pressure suits. And we’ve actually recently created a version that can be done entirely from home. There is information about that in the Show Notes. You can contact the show at podcast@museumofflight.org Until next time, this is your host, Sean Mobley, saying to everyone out there on that good earth, we’ll see you out there, folks.