Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
At 35, Dava Newman's an MIT engineer with a lab that would put James Bond's "Q" to shame and a passion for sending people to Mars.
Feb 16, 2000 | On a summer's day 30 years ago in her parents' Montana living room, a 5-year-old girl named Dava Newman sat before the television mesmerized by the image of a man bunny-hopping on the moon. Most people would agree: That mission was not just any old "giant leap for mankind," but -- all hyperbole aside -- our greatest achievement in space. But what have we done since? Well, we went to the moon until we got bored, and now we send up the space shuttle, which is as practical as a repair elevator, and about as exciting.
Newman wants more. She's grown up to be an MIT engineer, and she's determined to get us where we really want to go: Mars! She's got a good chance of succeeding: NASA funds a growing force of engineers like Newman who were children when the Eagle landed and who are now eager and capable enough to further our foray into the solar system.
Newman's graduate students, her fellow professors and her NASA astronaut colleagues all praise her for a rare alignment of qualities: She is a bright and incisive thinker; she is a driven, "roll up your sleeves and solve it now" engineer; and she is a collaborator, a team player who disdains the usual competitive stance of top scientists.
Her partner in life, Guillermo Trotti, became one of the first architects to work with NASA on space-station design. NASA likes his designs so much that they have become reality in the International Space Station habitation module. Trotti and Newman met at an MIT summer session for people interested in human designs for space. For him, she embodies the much-touted American can-do attitude: chin up, team together, get it done.
Though space flight is a much bigger game, Newman is still the undersized, over-spirited basketball player she was as a teenager, the hard-playing, teammate-motivating point guard who leads her team from the great city of Helena, Mont., all the way to the Junior Olympics. If the future mission to Mars inspires a sequel to "The Right Stuff," who should play Newman in the movie version? Trotti taps Jodie Foster: "She has the drive and the sensibility, the mental and physical beauty for the part."
It's not hard to imagine Foster playing the valedictorian wunderkind of Helena. Newman at first thought she wanted to be president (her father was a congressional campaign manager), but without female role models for either politics or athletics, she entered Notre Dame with dreams of becoming the world's best sports lawyer. She wanted to represent Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Her older brother, himself a lawyer, convinced her that engineering would give her a technical background that law schools would like.
But before she graduated, two things changed her course: She fell in love with flight, especially human space flight; and she despised Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative -- Star Wars. Space was no place for war. So, law be damned, aerospace engineering it was -- human aerospace engineering, because, as she once said to an audience of young students, that's the key to ensuring "cooperative, global human space exploration rather than ... militarization of space, to which I'm opposed" -- what a great moment that would be in a Foster film.
Good engineers are incessant tinkerers, and now that graduate school and professorship have set her at the forefront of aerospace bioengineering, Newman runs a workshop full of toys. It's like a messier version of Q's lab in the James Bond films, without the weapons, of course. There are gadgets everywhere: computers, treadmills, whirling platforms, ceiling tracks, moving robots -- all generating the engineering know-how to send people to Mars.
The first set of problems has to do with getting astronauts there and back without them turning to jelly. These are problems that scientists, including Newman, began studying on the Mir space station cosmonauts. After a few months in zero gravity, the cosmonauts' bones and muscles began to deteriorate, especially in the legs, pelvis and back. The human body evolved in gravity. We're meant to be bipeds that pound the Earth as we move about every day, and we have come to rely on that pounding. Our skeleton needs the repeated stress of our walking weight to break down old, brittle bone, release the trapped calcium and use it to grow sturdy new bone. Without daily pounding, bone doesn't regenerate. It just gets brittle. Likewise, our muscles -- even if we're not athletic in the modern sense -- require the daily motions of moving about and carrying our weight to stay healthy.
Newman's rocket science colleagues claim they can send a manned spacecraft to Mars and back in two years (a solid achievement at over 6,000 mph). Given what we know about debilitation in zero gravity, here's what would happen to the person on the ship: A 30-year-old astronaut would come back with the osteoporotic bones of an 80-year-old woman. Pull him out on the landing pad to congratulate him and he will collapse. It will take him months to build up enough muscle to walk again, and he could break his bones a number of times in the process. What's needed are countermeasures, as the engineers call them.
One of Newman's countermeasures is a rotating bed, a long, body-wide platform that whirls about quickly. You lie down on it with your head toward the center, and as it spins your feet press against a little endplate. To try it on Earth is sort of a sickening ride. But if you tried it in space (with your eyes closed), you would feel more or less as though you were standing still on Earth: The centrifugal force of the whirling mimics the force of gravity. If the Mars astronaut slept on this every "night," his body would spend a third of the voyage in artificial gravity, though he would have to get used to the sensation of sleeping standing up.
Another Newman lab project is a specialized treadmill with bungee cords that pull the runner down to the track with a force close to that of gravity. Mir cosmonauts had an early version of this, and they were required to jog on it for four hours a day. Newman and her colleagues work on combinations of treadmill design and dietary supplements to see if they can shorten the amount of exercise time required and still curtail the bone and muscle loss. Newman's greatest laboratory ever goes into operation next year: the International Space Station, which will be home to a continuous supply of bone-losing, muscle-atrophying astronauts to experiment on.
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