Revolutionary space suit design requires thinking about problems in fundamentally new ways rather than incremental improvements; the bio suit concept represents a paradigm shift from traditional gas-pressurized suits to mechanical counter pressure systems that apply pressure directly to the skin, enabling greater mobility, reduced energy expenditure, and improved performance for future Mars missions, while also providing Earth applications for treating conditions like stroke and spinal cord injuries.
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Okay, good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining today. We are excited and we're going to get started in the next couple minutes. Um, we are really really excited for today's session of PTS 2020 uh 2026 and today we have Dr. David Newman joining us and we're really really excited and honored to have her join us today. Uh I am really excited to be joining you guys from Future Nation School here in Johannesburg. Let's hear Future Nations >> and we are excited to have Future Nations join us today to be here with Future Nation School. It's really an honor and a privilege to be here with an amazing bunch of students and I hope to see many many many more students many of more of your locations really soon. So please do allow us a few minutes to wait uh for a few more students to join and we will share the YouTube links now as well in the chat. If I could kindly ask that someone be so kind as to post them on the WhatsApp groups from the chat.
Thank you.
Hello.
>> Good morning, Dr. Newman. How are you?
>> Good morning. Good to see you.
>> Great to meet you. Thank you so much for joining us today.
>> Oh, my pleasure. You can hear me loud and clear. Yes, Dr. Newman, good morning and how are you, >> John? Good. Good to see you. Good afternoon, I guess, for you all.
>> Yes, it is afternoon. So, we're just waiting for a few students uh to join uh perhaps maybe two or three minutes, then we should be able to start the session.
>> Perfect. And I want to maybe check um my screen share.
And I'd also like to see if um I'd love to see if uh if to make sure that you can hear the sound, not just me talking, but I have some um nice sound on the video. So I'd like to check that if we can.
>> Yes, perhaps we can even check that before we start the session. Or while we play the videos, we'll send a reactions or type in the chat or raise a hand and just notify you uh that we can hear the sound or we can't hear the sound.
>> Perfect. Okay, let's just see. Also, okay, here we go. It says also share system audio. So, I think maybe if I put that on, I should turn that on. And then let's see if Let's see if that works.
Okay.
No, you you're you're seeing my slides, correct?
>> Yes. Yes. Yes, we can see your slides.
Doctor, >> and now are you are you seeing the big screen or are you seeing the preview?
Which ones are you seeing?
>> We are seeing the preview.
>> Okay.
>> Full screen now.
>> No, it's on the Yeah, it's on the full screen on my side now. Sorry, there was a delay there on my end.
>> Okay. So, you're seeing the full screen, not my notes.
>> Yes. Correct.
>> Yes.
>> Okay. Because I can't see you all anymore. But yeah, if you keep uh you know, give me audio feedback. No, let's just um Okay, let's see here.
Okay, I'm off of full screen, but let me Okay, let's get Okay, maybe we'll Okay, let's try the Let's try the sound on this one.
And let me know if you're you're back in full screen.
back in full screen.
>> Excellent.
And >> your sword can stretch as far as you can and can still retain it shape. Virtually indestructible.
>> Can you hear that? It's loud in my ears, but can you all hear that?
>> Loud and clear. And very interesting as well. That's Edna and Mrs. Incredible from the Incredibles.
>> That's exactly one of my favorites.
taught me a lot about spaceacuit design.
>> Amazing.
>> Okay, then I think um yeah, I think I won't put my slides on until we start because it's nice to see you all uh before I get started when I put them in full screen mode then I then I lose my video with you all.
>> Mr. Mrage, do you think we should start now or a few minutes?
>> Sorry, Mr. Jacobs. I was me there. So, uh we have about 39 schools or 38 schools online at the moment in here and on the YouTube stream we have about 12 schools online but I think for the sake of time we can get started.
>> All right. So, um let me formally introduce uh Dr. Newman. You can say a few words and she can start the presentation.
>> Okay. So, good good afternoon to all.
Thank you for joining us. We are really excited to be here for today's session.
Uh I'm really excited. I am Mr. Jacobs.
I am at Future Nation School in Johannesburg and Future Nation, let's get it up. So I have a bunch of students here with me. So we are in Johannesburg, South Africa today. here with the students. Really excited for today's session. And we excited to be joined by schools across South Africa, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Kenya today. And Path is to Space 2026 impacting over 3,000 students across these four nations. It truly is an honor to be part of this program. So without further ado, I'd like to hand over today's session or or hand over the floor to my colleague, good friend, and brother, Mr. Shan Jacobs. Uh Mr. Jacobs all yours sir.
>> Thank you. Thank you Mr. Mirage. Uh students and educators on behalf of the future African Space Explorers at STEM Academy processor. It's um it's our great honor and a pleasure to warmly welcome you Dr. Newman. Um we are truly excited and deeply grateful to host you for the pathways to space session. your pioneering contributions to space um aerospace engineering, uh human space exploration, advanced space technology and STEM education in particular. They continue to inspire our students, our educators, researchers and the future of our innovators, you know, across the globe, not only as VASA but across the globe. So your presence means a great deal to our learners and the broader African space community. We are very confident that your insights, experience and vision for the future of our space exploration will leave a lasting impact on everyone joining us today and obviously beyond this session. So, thank you very much for taking time to engage with us and inspire the next generation of our African space explorers. We are honored to with us and we look forward to an incredible session. Thank you very much. Uh Dr. Dava, the floor is all yours.
>> Hi everyone. Good afternoon. Hope you can hear me loud and clear and I really excited uh to talk to you today and we're going to jump into a lot of details. I think you've probably have a lot of background and um going to talk to you about uh space suit spaceuit technologies uh and hope that you might all join us on this wonderful career path in in STEM. Now I'm going to do full screen and um maybe give me an audio uh thumbs up. You can see my whole screen.
>> Yes. Someone give me an audio confirmation. Good. Because I can't see you anymore. Okay.
>> So, >> excellent. Okay. Well, just uh this cover. This is our latest uh US National Academy study on a science strategy for the first three human missions to Mars.
And that's what I spend all my time thinking about. How do we get astronauts safely uh to the moon next and then onward to Mars? Mars because we're looking and searching for the evidence of of life, past life or future life.
That's the big scientific goal. And the the suits are very important to keep our astronauts healthy and safe and enable the the future of exploration.
I've had the great honor to um serve at NASA as the NASA deputy administrator.
That's the number two. and with President Obama and I my the administrator was Charlie Charlie Balden. So uh quite an honor that was way back 10 years ago. Um and my entire career has been at MIT the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and I serve as the Apollo Professor of Astronautics there.
Okay. So I want you to uh I'm going to quickly mention actually four different suits for space and Earth. Even though I do a lot of space research, I'm always always thinking about what are the earth benefits and what does our technology have to do with earth? And I want to push you all hopefully as aspiring engineers uh physicists uh poets and philosophers to just ponder this question. What is revolutionary?
is I'm going to show you some space suits design that are really trying to push push forward in terms of what revolutionary technology is.
So a possible answer just some some thoughts not really an answer for me when I say what is revolutionary design what is a revolutionary engineering approach here's um some issues that I think come up usually the genius the genius of any design of any invention is actually in the gen the generalities of it the general not usually the fine fine details it's usually in maybe a thinking about something in a new way. Maybe your new ideas can illuminate a pathway towards a significant expansion. You know, we we know a certain amount. We're trained in school and certain disciplines, but really revolutionary ideas come in and think about what's that what's that pathway that maybe no one's thought about. And the inspiration um can then help us think about a great leap forward. Not just incremental design but but something that really is is a in engineering terms we call that a step change a leap forward a giant leap forward or a step change and triggers a transformation of intuition. That is not easy right that is not easy to to think differently to transform you know basically our more daily thoughts. And then my last bold here, you know, revolutionary paradigm shifts are often simple, very elegant, kind of majestic, beautiful, and characterized by order and symmetry. This as far as my studies have shown. Okay. Really importantly, we as educators need to provide an environment for creativity, imagination, and innovation. That's that's where good thinking starts is in the environment.
You're surrounded by your peers. You have to be open-minded and you're allowed to um explore and think about new ideas.
As any good researcher, we've done a lot of research in the space suits. I'm not going to read these to you, but I just wanted to provide this this slide deck to your your teachers here. And so, um you always have to go back. You have to know all the research, all the ideas that came before you and then think about how you're going to contribute to the future. That's as researchers, that's uh that's what we do. So kind of showing you one snapshot of a a bit of what we call a literature review. And the important thing here is that I look a lot at space suit mobility. How do we make new space suits that are much more mobile than previous ones? I study humans. I take an engineering approach.
And so I I model I look at, you know, the biomechanics and energetics. We we do a lot of simulation kind of digital twins now, digital astronauts. That's all under performance and modeling. And then a third category of background in uh what we call the the biosuit a new approach to space suit design and that is uh we're going to talk about that in great detail and it it looks at systems engineering the whole system not just the astronaut not just the suits but our rovers our robots now loaded with our you know AI and and machine learning.
Okay. So, suit number one is actually um what I call the gravity loading countermeasure suit or skin suit for short. Okay. What is this? And what's a little bit of the background? Maybe uh I'm going to check with you. Hopefully, you're seeing a video. There's no sound, but are you seeing someone running on a treadmill?
>> Yes, Doc. We can see that.
>> Great. Okay. Well, I don't get to go to the moon and Mars very often. As a matter of fact, you know, we haven't been there, but but in our lab, we can hang you from the rafters. So, here's one of my graduate students running really loping uh and partial gravity like a moon. Moon is 16 gravity. Mars is 38. Spaceuit is very, very stiff. So, to simulate a real space suit, we put on these carbon fiber bars. You see that exoskeleton?
And get on the treadmill on that partial gravity simulator. And now we're we're measuring the energy the workload. How much energy are you using to um basically lope in in that uh in that spacuit. Okay. The second video here we go underwater. Again, we try every which way. So this is in a water tank and I'm simulating lunar gravity. I'm loading the person for 16 gravity. And now here's a Martian simulation. Now we're going to 3/8 gravity. Let's just call that a third of gravity. And you can see the person it looks looks kind of like a bouncy you know rather than now here we're flying in the aircraft the aircraft also pictures on the right here we're flying parabolic flight and that's a lunar simulation 16 gravity you're very very light and here's a Martian gravity that looks like the person has more more control more control in the Martian in the Martian flights and then over on the right you see the the blue suit and some black suits. Now, this is the skin suit, the gravity loading countermeasure suit that we've flown um goodness sakes. Now, we've flown it uh started in 2015 and then flew it again in 2017 to the International Space Station and we just flew it in 2023 um back on the what's called the Axiom 2 mission. And um again, for reference, we won't go into too many details, but you can ask me all kinds of questions. We're trying to reload the person. So imagine from your shoulders down to your feet.
Onedimensional loading is the way to think about this. Trying to apply the equivalent of maybe 50% a half of a body weight to your souls. So as you float around in a microgravity environment, you're getting extra loading because in space we lose a lot of muscle and bone.
That's a big problem. So we call this a countermeasure suit. If I lose 30% of my muscle mass or if I lose one to two% of my bone each month on a six-month mission, that's can be very damaging.
So, this is a suit when you're exercising, you put it on when you're on the treadmill, you put it on when you're on the erometer, the rowing machine, and we're trying to it's kind of in parallel. It's in parallel with um your exercise so that we can reload the body longitudinally.
As I said, all of our space technology has implications for here on earth. Very importantly, we study stroke. Just in the US, we have over 5 million people afflicted with stroke. Uh we have a lot of spinal cord injuries, uh another disease, multiple scerosis, uh cerebral paly, many many amputations. This is just data from the US. If you look at that globally, of course, it's it's 10x.
So what possibly then could could our suits how could we help studying people studying these exercise countermeasure suits? So this is what we do to understand, you know, performance in in one gravity. We look at the biomechanics of someone walking. We put what's called IMUs, inertial measurement units. We put a lot of cameras on people. That's those reflective lights. And we're basically studying motion, studying everyday activities and the kind of in some then from the designs of our skin suit or microgravity suit and here's the biomechanics.
There's the measurements from our technology there. Think about these as wearable sensors. We're trying to see if um you can wear these and we can get can match, you know, the ground truth and this loading suit or this resistive suit is a way to think about it. I can't um cure those diseases that I mentioned, but what I can do perhaps and you see a a nice a small u little person here wearing a gravity uh countermeasure suit and what it's trying to do is increase your locomotion, the control of your locomotion. is trying to improve the weight bearing and the speed and the gate. Gate that's your locom motion is trying to give you more of improved range of motion. You know how far your your limbs can move and trying to improve your muscle tone. Those are important things to help astronauts but we would argue more important to help people here on Earth to help potentially millions of people here on Earth. Okay, quickly moving to a second suit and this was a concept suit. We really worked on the technologies here. I know you're interested in advanced technology. So, I wanted to show you this one. We called it the V2 suit concept. Again, this was for inside the spacecraft, not outside.
Outside is called extra vehicular activity, and we're going to get to that, but right now we are looking at IVA suit technology. This is inside the vehicle. So, the person, the astronaut is already protected in the space station or in a spacecraft. So now these are really form fitting suits that help them do something else, help them train, help them not um all that physiology I've talked about, the muscles, the bones, the orientation is trying to counter those, trying to provide technology that can help astronauts perform when they're inside the space station. So the technologies here in this V2 suit, it's uh you can see the name of it, variable vector countermeasure suit. Um, so we're putting something called control moment gyros, CMGs. Think about little motors on your arms or your legs. They're going to resist your movement. So if I move my arm or if I move my legs as I'm floating about in microgravity. This suit has these little almost like flywheels, if you will, these CMGs, and they're resisting you. So maybe the way to think about this is imagine if you were trying to well, if you're at the beach or in the water, you're trying to move through the water. you'll you'll feel that viscosity. You'll feel the water resist you or that's that's kind of a way to to think about this. It's uh those control moment gyros are pushing against your motion. They're trying to resist your your motion. We track the motion. The human limbs, we have to look at the human, you know, human system interface, the design of it. It has to be very comfortable because you're always designing for for people. And we can't use a lot of power. That's a big constraint because it has to be wearable. So I don't get to carry a big battery pack around with me. So that's um that's really all the technologies that we that we have to work on and have to advance before something like this suit would be realizable.
Um this is known as kind of an engineering flow diagram. Just wanted to show you a little bit. You don't have to memorize it, but we say how is this whole system going to work? There's a mockup suit on the on the right with those control moment gyros. again they're going to kind of resist the motion but we have to initialize our electronics that's the input there's a lot of computation a lot of computation um that's basically looking at the orientation you know what what orientation are you up down in in microgravity we can float around right and then what motor commands am I going to give to the the suit to the limbs to resist that that motion so the flywheel spin rate what's the gimbal rate that means angular rate you know again how much power those those inertial measurement units those IMUs and spin rates. So all of this is going into uh what we call a feedback loop and then that's going to provide the right resistance to the person and the p as the person is moving around. So hopefully at least conceptually that that makes sense. It's a good to see kind of an engineering flow diagram u a lot of design and a lot of electronics and a lot of engineering kind of behind each of these blocks. So, this was a concept uh an advanced concept that we were able to design and build. And there's the real prototypes, a nice engineering CAD drawing on the left. And then you see the actual um CMG's control moment gyros that would be put on the limbs. Now, way back when we were doing this over the last decade, uh we couldn't quite get the hardware small enough to be really wearable. Uh, but you know, it's always worth looking at these good ideas and look at all those wires on that device. You don't like wires in space because they're all going to float around and and get in your way.
So, there's still work to do on this concept, but uh that was a fun one to kind of again think about a new design.
Now, I want to switch our thinking and think about space suits, meaning EVA or extra vehicular activities. So, now that's a much tougher design challenge.
Now the astronaut has to uh have their entire life support system. They have to have the suit around them because they're going to leave the spacecraft.
And what is articulated here, if you you've studied space suits, you probably are well aware just to keep the astronaut alive, you have to provide the astronaut with a pressure, you know, pressure around the astronaut. You have to provide all protection from radiation, micromedorites, anything from the extreme environment. uh space, the moon, Mars, they're very very extreme environments and we have to protect the astronaut. We want to understand the human performance and um of course they need gloves, they need a helmet, you have to worry about thermal control and the backpack or what we call the portable life support system, the PL, that's where you get your oxygen, uh regulate the pressure, you have to scrub the carbon dioxide, get rid of those trace contaminants, make sure there's humidity control, thermal control, power communications. So, the best way to think about the I'll let you hear this and then I'll come back to talk.
>> Oh, dad.
>> Jack Schmidt having a few problems.
>> Okay. So, what you're seeing is my lunar that is the lunar spacuit. The moon spaceuit. We had one way back in the late 1960s, 1970s, Jack Schmidt. He is the only scientist we sent to the moon.
And boy, did we make his job hard to do the science because that suit wasn't too mobile. Now, it's a it's a wonderful engineering design. I call it the world's smallest spacecraft because you're designing a spacecraft and now you're shrinking it around the person.
So, the Apollo suit on the left, those videos, I call them my Apollo bloopers because those are kind of some funny images that people usually don't get to see when we went to the moon. Uh, in the middle, that's the current space suit we have for the International Space Station. We used the same suit on the space shuttle, now the International Space Station. We've been using this suit for decades, decades, and decades.
Actually, the last four decades, we've been using a suit like this. And and on the right are some of our advanced concepts for the bio suit. We don't want you in a big balloon, a big pressurized gas shell. I'd rather have the pressure applied directly to your skin because then I can make you very mobile, athletic. So currently kind of the state-of-the-art for what's the NASA extra vehicular mobility unit. That's the current NASA suit. As I said, we have to give credit to the wonderful engineering. It's the world's smallest spacecraft. It has a pressure of close to 30 kilopascals. Let's call it, you know, 27 kilopascals. It's very heavy, you know, o over 140 kilos. And weightlessness, okay, you're floating, but uh that's just way too much mass.
That's way too heavy. And it it doesn't work for locomotion when you're on space station floating around. Great. But this is not a suit for the moon or Mars. And that's what I care about is getting people back to the moon and Mars. So, we uh the bio suit is very mobile. is very lightweight. It has a lot of safety advantages. It has tunable stiffness in the joints. Uh you see on the bottom left there, uh Mars is an amazing terrain, huge mountains and huge creasses. And we have to really be kind of like like Olympic athletes. So we need a very lightweight flexible suit trying to basically tune the stiffness of the joints to help the person out.
And uh we're kind of getting ready for for for Mars. The data that you see there is we have a robot and called the robotic spac suit tester in in the lab and you put different concepts put different spac suits on it and uh you can see the the robot move and then we calculate the torqus. What are torqus?
That's a a force. Uh it's basically a newton per meter uh units. And so that's how hard are you making the astronaut work? That's what the robot tells us. It gives us the torqus and angles. And um it's really hard data to get because I would have to um have a measure have something to measure the torque inside the person's elbow or knee and that would be very painful. So that's why we use the robot is those are um really hard measurements and you can see down below if I'm flexing my elbow the data for elbow flexion and you kind of see it we call that a hysteresus curve. as you bend your elbow that's kind of on the top there and as you release the elbow that's a spring back or hysteresus curve in the current gas pressurized the traditional gas pressurized design.
So that's all background for extra vehicle activity. I'm going to show you two more uh suits that all relate to EVA and this third one it's best way to think about it is a suit within a suit.
So, we have this big bulky pressurized NASA suit. Uh, this is actually the NASA suit uh kind of designed for lunar Mars.
Unfortunately, it's way too uh heavy and bulky for for my taste. But be that as it may, we designed a protection suit inside. Why? Because during training, the astronauts are undergoing a lot of injuries, especially in the shoulder uh and the elbows. So, we said, how can we put some protection? And so on the bottom right you see one of our designs for the shoulders. It's a it's a very comfortable u very personalized airbag system if you will for the for the shoulders. If you can if you can see that the top right is a x-ray scan of the suit. So you can see all those bearings all those uh kind of metal hard points. You can imagine if you're inside that suit there's just a lot of places where uh you could damage your your muscles and your bones and your your shoulders if they're rubbing against all those hard points. So what was the technology uh in this suit? It's u it uh wonderful, wonderfully complex. Uh you can see the sensors in the bottom left there. But we had to make our own sensors. So um you can see the the manufacturing then of the molds uh putting them into a vacuum chamber, cur curating them, um spin coating them, and then we get these kind of rubbery pressure sensors that you see. We have a nice name for this pressure sensor soup within a soup called the polypo. uh Italian for like the octopus suit.
And here I'll show you a video of it in the current um you know planetary suit called the Mark III space suit that NASA has. And here we have our suit within the suit for uh training session.
So there we are at NASA. There's one of one of my wonderful graduate students.
You're now a faculty member.
And we're trying to demonstrate mobility. It's pretty hard to get down in that suit.
Uh we call this the reverse macarena if you know that dance.
But that's pretty good. If you can do a push-up in a space suit, we're making progress. Now again, this is a big gas pressurized suit with our system inside with all those sensors. Uh an inertial measurement unit, an IMU, that's kind of what you have if you have a a smart watch. You have an IMU right there on your wrist. And then we have a lot of pressure sensors um on the shoulders and the arms demonstrated. Uh we took a lot of data to compare um how how mobile was the person um especially around the shoulder because as I mentioned, we get a lot of injuries during astronaut training. The astronauts will train 12 hours in the underwater tank, the buoyancy tank for every 1 hour of space flight. And um so these are some pressure measurements. So what you're looking here is we're measuring, you know, how what kind of pressure was on the shoulder. Is that enough to cause injury? That's in kilopascals. And if you see anything red like 80 90 kilopascals, we really worry about that because that's enough to cause blue is good, but those you know, yellow to red is not good because that could cause injury. And then in summary, I'll show you kind of all the data we collected.
Um, you're going to see a a video here that those those uh internal sensors on the arm, they're plotted here. These are all pressures and the scale is, you know, 0 to 60 kilopascals. You don't want to see any pressures basically. I'd say over, you know, 30 40 kilopascals.
And so, so watch watch this. Um, yeah, there we go. So on the bottom right will show you which sensor is being measured. That's a lot of pressure there on the forearm. Now up by the shoulder area, the purple. And can you see that? Now you can see the green kind of the blue, the red, and especially up there in terms of the that green area that's on the lower wrist. You're really putting a lot of pressure uh to move the suit. you're moving as the astronaut inside and then you have to push the suit and move against a suit and those pressures are high enough to to cause some injuries, some training injuries for the crew. So, what's a design solution? Well, we designed all kinds of I told you looked at the the shoulder pads, uh, these lobster looking contraptions, if you will, to make sure it was very flexible, some air systems, lots of design to get this right, a little airbag, and, you know, able to, uh, provide some solutions.
Okay. So, um, but if we really wanted to change suit design and maybe not have a gas pressurized suit, uh, people have thought about that, uh, throughout the history of of space suit, uh, design.
And, uh, so I'll show you a fun video here. This goes way back when we were going to the moon the first time in the 1960s and 1970s getting ready for Apollo. We had a lot of creative ideas, I think. Can you imagine a spacuit that looks like that? a a sphere. It's like a a sphere, but it would have your arms and legs would go outside of it. Now, the sphere is the pressurization, right?
They're putting someone in a literally in a pressurized um ball here, and then they're giving them arms and and leg capability. So, you know, don't uh be constrained. This is pretty crazy. Now, of course, it never flew in space, but it's a really good demonstration of some mobility, limited mobility, kind of like a hamster cage. And then if you needed to use your arms and legs, you could put the arms and legs outside. This is a very important uh prototype called the space activity suit. And we've we've studied this. I I know the inventors of it because our biosuit is kind of a new version of So this was our inspiration, the space activity suit. It's like, wow, that doesn't look like a normal space suit because now the material is directly on the skin and you're relying on the material. Now look at that. uh no one can climb up uh stairs or a treadmill in the current suit, but in this space activity suit of Dr. um Paul Webbs, it was a really amazing concept.
I think a genius design concept kind of way before its time because this is five decades ago now. It never got flight tested. NASA never flew it. And the reason is because see the subject there, it takes two people to help dress them.
And you don't have two extra people to help dress you in space. We have very limited crew and crew size. So, see this part? Uh the reviewers, the space suit reviewers were saying, "Well, it looks like a leotard for a 2-year-old."
So, it was a great concept, but they decided that um um not to continue the funding after the the 70s. But I always was really intrigued. I thought it was just a marvelous idea. And so that's the inspiration for a lot of of our work, you know, a few decades later. Again, always important to know what came before your work and how you could improve upon it or or make some of those breakthroughs. This poster that I have on the bottom um is important. It's kind of all the human uh spaceflight vehicles and space stations that humanity's ever flown. So in the US, in um Russia, in Europe, and all of our international partners and those little dots are that's how many, you know, EVAs or extra vehicular activities we've done. And if you take a look on the right, you'll see that we've done now it's the numbers bigger than that, but over 500, we're pushing, you know, 600 EVAs, those white dots. the first mission to Mars, the very first mission to Mars with about four people or six people. Uh we'll probably stay there for over 300 days on the Martian surface doing our science looking for life. That very first mission, we're going to have over a thousand spacew walks, a thousand EVAs.
So we're going to double what human history has done in the last 50 years.
So that's a big task. That's a big design challenge. Okay. Now I'll show you what how we think about uh designing the bio suit to address those challenges.
Um, again, I just kind of love all those early concepts. You see, uh, some of the takes on humans and notice here on the left, you'll see humans and ro and rovers because humans can, you know, be very mobile if we give them give them rovers to work on. And then I also uh I also inspired by in the uh incredible.
So maybe you like this one as well.
>> Your sword can stretch as far as you can and still retain its shape. virtually indestructible.
Machine washable, darling. That's a new feature.
>> So, that's what we're trying to do as engineers and designers. Uh get one of those stretchy suits that would be indestructible. And uh we haven't done the fire testing on our suit yet, but we have some pretty uh pretty amazing uh pretty amazing materials that we've invented that I can tell you about. And I want to reflect here too. Maybe some of you are very interested not just in engineering, but you know, design and art. And I want to make sure to encourage you to pursue everything that you're interested in including uh STEM education, science, technology, engineering, math, but also the arts. I always work with artists. I always work with designers on my teams. Um maybe it'll be a a question at the end of my talk to see if you know uh what the image is. A very famous uh maybe image on the the left, the painting, and on the right, I'll tell you what that is.
That's us in a space suit out on a night uh traverse uh trying to measure uh the astronaut performance. So I put them together because I think our night image of EVA uh looked like uh the masterpiece on on the left.
Okay. Now I have some data slides to show you because we collect a lot of data. We have to see are our designs equal or better than what has ever flown before. And so um we have a lot of papers on this. I I'll give you all these references. I'm going to go kind of quickly to to make sure we have time for your questions as well. But we're looking at MCP. My designs are mechanical counter pressure. That is pressurizing directly on the skin a second skin suit rather than putting you in a balloon or a gas pressurized suit.
So if you look at the data on the left in terms of metabolic rate, that's watts. That's how much energy are you are you uh kind of fraction of metabolic rate. You see the pressurized suits there with high watts, high metabolic rates, 500, 750, almost a thousand. You look at the mechanical counter pressure, those are on the the the left side of the graph, unsuited, they're way up there because uh you don't use very much energy at all. But we put in a mechanical counter pressure uh suit and we have a lot of reduction in metabolic rate or energy expenditures. That's what we want. And then on the right, we show locom motion. Okay. And some of them were on the rover traverses again humans humans and our machines uh for the for the next moon and Mars missions. And then again you can take a look and look at metabolic rate. Now watts is up on the y ais and you can see um the mechanical counter pressure or the pressurized pressurized suit in terms of what our energetics are. So we're comparing it to the suit. this one. Um, you saw the videos early on about someone on what we call the moonwalker that's being suspended, you know, from from the ceiling. And so this one, I just I'm showing you data here, uh, that's very interesting. Um, on the left, if you see the red line, the red data, that's a lunar gravity. It's it's less than 0.2 gravity condition. And cost of transport, that's jewels over kilograms per meter. So think of cost of transport again as a as a dimension a non-dimensional then um energy it's energy but now I'm dividing by your mass how many kilos and how far are you moving uh meters so jewels per kilo per meter so now I can compare you know the data I get to the data you get because you might be taller or shorter than me weight have more mass or have less mass so all of our subjects we can compare now so that's the data we got about you know just below six for the for the moon simulations in the moon walker. When we went to Mars, we couldn't believe this.
We got less, it was less cost of transport. We used less energy at Mars, but Mars is a heavier gravity. So, we really scratching our heads about that one when we first got that data. And then if you go to 1g one gravity, normal uh gravity, you're going to increase your your cost of transport. The so there's a reason that we got less at the Mars condition versus the lunar condition. Um, what we think happened is that basically you're loping when you're on the moon like the Apollo videos. At Mars, you're you're heavier. 3A's gravity, but you're very stable. At the moon, it's so light. That one six gravity is just so light that you waste a lot of energy moving your arms and legs. So, you're trying to stand up, you're trying to do your locomotion, but you're also kind of flailing around. So, that was what was happening on the moon.
Um, you were kind of wasting some of the the energy. So, we published a fun paper. is called when on the moon and and when you're go to the moon and Mars run meaning loping don't walk because you're actually more efficient you take less energy to run than you do walking so uh that was that was very fun research we can kind of continue that and again for fun on the bottom right we put some of our uh locomotion you know walking running skipping loping and we kind of put it to a a bit of a music score as as well uh you saw the exoskeleton in one of the videos there's one my wonderful graduate students in the exoskeleton and again we're testing some models some engineering models and there you see some of the equations below uh a simple model a mass mass of a person on and putting modeling some leg stiffness the suit stiffness as well as the human leg and saying hey can we potentially tune the suit can we make a suit uh that basically would would kind of help help a a person walk when we get to the moon or Mars okay so that leads us to the biosuit. I've been leading up to it, but I want to share now some of the the designs of of the bio suit uh with you uh quickly. It's uh again mechanical counter pressure. We're very inspired uh by looking at uh animals and nature and uh trying to provide uh mobility. Uh you see uh one equation only. That's a work. I'm trying to minimize extra work. Any extra work you have to do to move the suit, I wanna I want to make that zero. I want you to use all of your energy uh for your exploration. So, here's some equations here. They basically the designs. Um we can I'm going to kind of go quickly over this and show you the results. We've been measuring people uh people with skin tight kind of what we call second suits. What are the requirements? Always coming up with our design requirements for mechanical counter pressure. So you can see um images here, scanned images, laser scans, optical scans of how we how much you know we're kind of trying to say like knee surface area in the knee region when you flex from a 0 degrees to a 90 degrees what we have to account for both in surface area as well as volume.
So we're kind of mapping uh the human movement or the skin. Here's more maps from a very kind of high resolution and then we get something called a strain map. So those colored maps then are telling us about when a person moves um what does my suit have to accommodate in terms of stress or strain. Those are some engineering measurements. Here's some really early prototypes. We said well maybe we'll uh put some channels into a urethane and we could pressurize again we're going to pressurize to about onethird of an atmosphere. That's that 30 kilus pascal design goal. And we use all kinds of different early prototypes.
Um these lines of non-extension uh that's one of my patents coming up with this and say well if we design it kind of this Spider-Man looking suit we think we can pressurize someone. Here's another this is using elastic bindings very tight uh like inner tubes elastic bindings on someone. Can we get the pressure that we're looking for and at the same time can we allow you for full mobility full mobility in your knees?
lots of data looking at that ideal, you know, 27 kilopascal and uh we were really happy that we were pretty pretty much able to hit our design specification with some of these mechanical counter pressures and um then looking again at past work. Oh, this looks like it got chopped off a little bit, but we were able to do some hourlong tests. There's the students with a subject uh in the the vacuum chamber in the gas vacuum chamber and continued work continued work over you know many years the last couple decades um using more precise uh something called digital image correlation to look at that pattern um kind of u measure monitor uh that pattern see we're looking at how the joints move. So that's what you see um kind of on that video there. Uh we're quantifying human movement and then once we know what human movement is, we have to put in active materials. So it's kind of think of it as an elastic suit, but we even we want to put it on. It'll be tight and we want to cinch it up around you. So here's some of the designs. Uh in this case it was a shape memory alloy that's a nickel titanium kind of like a fancy zipper if you will. You apply voltage and it cinches up and that way we can and now we're quantifying it. we're seeing basically how how good were our designs um all the engineering design modeling and analysis and I can provide any of those references but uh can we do it we we think we can and so um we've been on this journey to kind of design this this hybrid human biosuit for for quite a while now um we take a lot of inspiration from from nature we're trying to you know maximize mobility uh this uh this this biosuit has it might be it has 340 meters, 340 meters just for one person of these lines, the lines that go around the the suit, if you can imagine that. And we're minimizing any, you know, any energy, any extra energy that you have to use to uh, you know, to move the suit. We work internationally with a lot of sports companies. Uh this is Dynazi, one of our our our great companies, Traty and Associates, the architects and designers who really help us uh with kind of all elements of boots and helmets, uh gloves, you name it. Um other areas of research since we're going back to to the moon and onward to Mars, we're uh looking at how how humans are what are we going to do? Where are we going to go when you uh we have had only robots and rovers on on Mars uh for a long time. And so when we go back, we provide these tools. And I hope these tools we go right on the suit, right inside your helmet to uh you know, give you the the plan, if you will, and help you help you um uh you know, navigate and get the science done. The cone crater is on the moon. This is a basically a redo of Apollo 14, the Apollo 14 mission. It was very interesting for us to analyze that because in the real Apollo mission way back on Apollo 14, the astronauts uh really didn't get their science done.
They didn't get their science done. They didn't have a lot of mobility in the suit and they couldn't see. You can't see on the moon because we don't have depth perception. So, we kind of have to give you like Superman Superman eyes in visibility because they really um almost fell into Cone Crater without getting their science done and they had to abort the EVA. they had abort the spacew walk and get back to the lunar module for safety reasons. So we redid the analysis of course u this is after the fact and but we redid the analysis that if you would have done on the far right there if you would have modified your traverse you could have gone to con crater you could have gotten all your science done at com crater and safely made it back to the lunar module. So we do a lot of um simulations, a lot of analysis, a lot of lunar kind of mission control simulations. And here you see uh the latest helmet design for for the biosuit. Hopefully some wearable, it won't be Google Glass, but hopefully some really nice um you know enhanced augmented uh vision going in that kind of that whole mission planning. We can embed that really nice smart architecture right in the suit. And um then let's just see uh more video here.
>> Hey, John.
>> Hey, Rob. Team group meeting in 15 minutes. Why don't you get set up and I'll meet you on site in a few.
>> Sounds good.
It's good.
>> Hey, John.
>> Hey, Rob.
>> Come here and look at these rocks from this perspective. I think we should place an APXS here.
>> Oh, okay. Nice. I totally missed that when I was just looking at the images.
So, I'll add that there, but it's really important. Those are the software tools we're developing. We're using today.
Those are some of my NASA colleagues.
And we use augmented reality and beam you either to the moon or Mars to get better science done. We're getting better science done. Uh, which is very exciting. Uh, these are really um the way of the future of exploration kind of developing these simulation tools. Uh, we can put you in a full Martian environment and it's the same software.
If I have it on my laptop, then I'm just um not part of the mission. I'm just kind of doing mission planning. But if I put uh myself or you in augmented reality, I'm convinced I'm on Mars. Now I'm a Mars explorer. So uh we also go to a lot of museums. We do a lot of outreach as much as we can. And I want to show you and kind of end on a video here that this is the current state-of-the-art of our technology for the bio suit. Um, so right currently today we're using 3D knitting in the lab. Um, really trying to to push I have some some uh prototypes here in my hands as as well here on the video. Can show you uh the latest and and greatest. You can see we uh you know push you in a 3D scan. Everyone gets their own suit. We develop these um you know very wonderful um sensors. We embed the sensors into the suit. The sensors give us a pressure readings. Uh we are inventing some new materials. The black threads though are pretty advanced. They're actually carbon doped polyethylene. So they help you um not just the per prof the pressure production but they also help for thermal and radiation partial radiation protection. So this new prototype has multifunctional fibers. It has the integrated sensing tunable compression at the joints and a very customized mobility for everybody. Um so um great this is uh thanks for everyone's attention. I I'm going to um take any questions if if we have time but a real pleasure to to speak with you all. See one last video.
you probably have some good space videos. I wanted to end with the Earth because everything I do, even though it's usually kind of out of this world and thinking about the moon and Mars, it's always important to come back down to Earth and say how can we uh you know protect the Earth? Earth is my my favorite planet. So, thanks for everyone's attention and uh how are we doing Sean? I think I probably can have time for a couple questions.
>> Oh, thank you. Thank you very much for that insightful uh presentation. Before I talk about the presentation, um yes, we do have questions. I can see there's already me who's raising their hand with the question. So uh please guys um as usual um if your friend has got the floor please mute your mic. Only the person who's asking the question should unmute their mic. Mita please go ahead with your question.
>> So hi >> I'm sorry. Is my voice audible?
>> Yes I can hear you.
Okay. So my question is on the first earlier part that you are presenting you said um in space there the people the astronauts lose a lot of muscle and bones. So how are you guys working to recover it and what did you do to minimize those losses?
>> Great questions. So so yeah that's one of my specialties kind of muscle and bone. Let's call it recovery. first studying how much are we losing. So uh first we but we've been studying that for quite a while ever since we've had the space shuttle previously and now 26 years on international space station people have been living up on international space station for the last 26 years. So we measure how much muscle, how much bone I mention, you know, 30% muscle loss, maybe up to 40% muscle strength loss. And um so you have to exercise when you're in space today, you have to exercise 2 hours a day.
Mandatory two hours a day to try to keep your muscles and your bones going. And so the uh one of the first suits I showed you, hopefully you can see this.
Um this is actually a suit that skin suit, the gravity countermeasure suit.
So, this is how we're trying to help prevent the muscle and bonelessness. If you wear this suit that I showed in my videos and showed you a little bit of the details. This is a suit that's flown over 100 million miles in space. This is a real flight suit. So, we put this on an astronaut on AX2, the Axiom 2 flight, and an astronaut wore wore this suit.
This is his suit, John Schopner suit. I designed it so we get the suit back. And um we're trying to load. We're trying to reload. You're in microgravity. So, the reason you're losing muscle and bone is because you're floating around. You you don't have, you know, if you look at 10,000 steps a day on your watch, but if you have zero steps a day. So, we're trying to reload. We're trying to put the pressure uh it's a compression suit back on the soles. So, that's how we one of the ways we're trying to address the muscle and bone loss as we kind of put you in this exercise suit, this countermeasure skin suit. Hopefully, that makes sense.
>> Thank you. Um, we've got, um, the next question is coming from Johanna. Please, Johanna, go ahead and, uh, unmute your mic and ask your question.
>> Hello, ma'am. Amazing presentation. Um, I have a lot of questions, but my main one is that, um, how I know you're only in very early prototypes, but how do you intend to handle bodily functions like sweating and, um, other bodily functions in the skin suit? Yeah, great question.
Um, so um we'll we'll do it a little bit different uh than the current way, but uh but let me um expand a little bit on current technology uh because now that I can hopefully you can see me, I can see you. So the current design of the suit uh there's a like this is a liner. It's all these layers in the current suit.
There's a little coupon of the current suit. Maybe you guys can see that. And then you wear something called a liquid cooling ventilation garment. So, this helps keep you cool or heat you up, but it's a it's not, you know, it's it's a like I call it astronaut lung underwear.
You kind of put this layer on. Uh, it's a suit that you're in. Then the pressure, then it's a balloon, right?
The current suit. So, all these layers, this is a pressure layer, a restraint layer. All this is gas pressurized. And then for thermal control, you have these layers. If you can see these layers, all these silver layers, a lot of that's for thermal. And then the suits are white.
The outside is the micromedorite. So, both the conventional gas pressurized suit, all these layers, but it's really heavy. Uh here's uh the prototype that I showed you in the video of the the bio suit, the 3D knitted biosuit. This is a I think this is my I think this is a Yeah, it's a it's a left arm. So, if we're going to put this on my left arm, I would put it like that. And but it's it's all it's all it's all one layer.
So, we can help with the thermal. It provides the pressure. That's its main job for my designs. apply the pressure, but then bodily functions or sweating, thermal, humidity control. You can kind of sweat through this material. So, this way you can kind of some really nice materials like wicking materials that you might wear in your clothes too. They can kind of help us with sweat to go to the bathroom, uh things like that, eating in suits because, you know, we have a a helmet on. We have a gas pressurized helmet. It's pretty you want to do that inside the vehicle before you go out. Uh there's essentially it's not very elegant. you essentially wear diapers when you're in the space suit.
Um, so we haven't made much improvements there in terms of how you do your those bodily functions. Usually, you know, you want to get all that business done. You get in the space suit, you have to be pressurized, then you go out and and do your your job. You'll get maybe a little bit in the helmet. You might get a little bit of um something to eat like a a snack, a food bar, and and maybe some some water, but water is really tricky because we don't want any water in the helmet. That that's a major emergency.
So, if it's just better right now, especially if you're in a rover or something like that, to eat, drink, go to the bathroom before you get into the suit to do your spacew walks because all of those issues really complicate the design of the suit. So, thanks. It's a great question.
>> Thanks so much.
>> Our next question comes from, go ahead and ask your question.
>> Okay. Hello. Thank you so much for the wonderful and engaging presentation. So my question is that have you ever tried the new advanced space suites actually in space and if not when are you planning to do so and what type of space suite are you currently using in space?
>> Okay, great question. So I think stage >> okay so uh yeah and so the question was have I ever tried the Artemis suits? So I yeah I know those well. Uh so here uh here happy we had a great launch.
Artemis 2. I was there for the launch.
Amazing mission 10 days. Uh they didn't have to have the space suits or EVA this trip because we just orbited of course.
But when we get to landing on the moon then uh then we'll have suits. They're conventional space suits. They're kind of big gas pressurized um really heavy.
So they're not going to provide the astronauts with the kind of mobility that I'm hoping for. So we keep, you know, working on our prototypes, our technology. Hopefully we could help in the future, especially for Mars exploration. I'm uh the moon suits are under contract with NASA. Um but unfortunately, they don't really have any technological advantages. Um they're a little bit better than we've flown Apollo, but that was a long long time ago. Um yeah, so right now they're way too bulky and massive. Um, but that's that's what we have. So, we're going to have to live with it for a while. Maybe some of the commercial folks will will uh you know, maybe they'll want to buy some of our our suits and and prototypes and and help us get a much a much lower mass suit. Uh, even the current Axiom suit. It really they call it the Axiom suit, but it's important to know David Clark company is actually making suit.
Axiom doesn't have a lot of space suit expertise. David Clark, they're right here. They're close colleagues. They're in Worcester, Massachusetts, just uh down the road here from me in Boston and Cambridge. And um they're making trying to make it a little bit lighter weight.
Uh most of the suit, the other important point to make is a lot more than half of the mass of the suit is that backpack that you're that you're wearing. And so that makes it very heavy. Um I have one of the I have a I have a bio suit behind me a little bit. I'm not sure if you can see this in my camera. Um, but here's a back of here's a here's a biosuit mockup. This is just a a mockup. It's not providing enough pressure, but you can kind of see maybe you can see a little bit of this backpack design. We have students kind of looking at 3D printing and things like that. I want to make the I'm trying to make the backpack much much much smaller, maybe half the size of what it is currently because that would be a big improvement in how we could do reduce uh mass of from the current standard. Great question.
Thanks.
Thank you. Um, Dr. Newman, do you mind if we just take a couple more questions?
I know we're running out of time, but if you do have time for a few more.
>> Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. I have a couple more minutes and I always give long answers. I'll try to give shorter answers.
>> No, it's great. Emanuel, I see that you have your hand up. Emanuel, do you mind me to ask you a question, please?
>> Okay, thank you. Uh, D, my question is is uh Okay. Are are you hearing me now?
>> Yes.
>> Yes, we can hear you.
>> Good. Okay. We are talking about of this life for designs of wearing wearing design. So, so it it is a bridge gas brer design. So, it it will be the light. It will be light weights and it is a mobility. It is so simple. We are talking about just like for. So how how to fix is that for the previous pair this we are talking about just like for it is using and just like for oxygen and so on are uh health within that matter.
So how it fit is that one to this one how to fit this life for it is when is way and to for oxygen on per so then uh it's so it's not simple to wear for simply so how to fix it and maybe in a spaces that so uh it's it takes the the long times for the space and there's no persons that help us with that that situation so how to fix it to with only for this one. So I it so it does make it does make sense for me. So can you explain about that?
I think I I only heard part of the question because it was breaking up a little bit but I think you're asking about the life support system and the weight of the life support system and how do we make it better was that the question >> yeah no my question is for in the previous where I are talking or we had learned life for based on the the out the outer parts of the space and material that you that's the peril ges and so other ges so how to fix it to the internal parts of our we are talking about for today's lesson is just like for this is taxi and so on. So, how to fix it? So, the outer part is to the inards.
You get me now or not?
>> No. Sean, can you hear the question? I don't have very good audio on her.
>> Regrettably, we I can't hear what she's saying, but is it possible if you can type your question in the group chat, then we'll read it out.
>> The question because it's real hard to hear your audio, but if you type the question, I can I can read it.
>> May you please type the question, then we'll read it for you um in in the group chat. Um, our next question comes from, uh, Charlotte. Charlotte, are you able to ask your question? Please go ahead and and >> Okay. Um, hello. So, um, I know we're trying to get to Mars, but I'm just wondering how will we have enough energy to get there because we've never been that far. And the more energy reser reserves we have, the heavier the spaceship will be. Um, which will make the journey longer and then we'll need even more energy.
>> Yeah. So, how we're going to get to Mars? Um, so that's a kind of a propulsion question, but I have a a reference for you as well. Let me uh here we go. Uh, that so this is a good report. Uh, we just finished our science strategy for for Mars. And so we're right now uh we base it on going to Mars. It'll take uh eight eight months to get there. It'll take a year and a half to come home. And we need to stay on the surface of Mars 300 days, 500 days because we're scientists. We're searching for life.
So, uh, the baseline missions right now to Mars, again, it's a, if you count that up, it's a two-year round trip just in journey and then hopefully exploration for about 300 days on the surface. So, we're using conventional propulsion um chemical, you know, basically chemical um propulsion like we do now a heavy lift. So, we have to have uh either the space launch system, we need um in the future to have SpaceX's um heavy lift, you know, Starship and Blue Origins also heavy lift. the world is at least going to have three capabilities coming up in the in the next few years. We've already you know launched SLS our space uh you know SLS rocket. So we need the heavy lift and that all is pertinent to your question.
How are we doing it? So these are solid and liquid rockets. Uh if you saw Artemis 2 uh first time we've used solid rocket engines uh since the space shuttle. So pretty exciting. was a big a big loud uh launch and that can get us all the way uh with humans to to Mars.
But we're also investing in new rocket propulsion. It's a great area for you all to study. What if we could do advanced ion propulsion? Um some plasma propulsion. I would love it. I would love it if uh instead of eight months to get to Mars that let's say it could take half the time, three to four months.
That would be ideal because again we're trying to keep our astronauts uh safe and if we can reduce by 50% the time it takes uh to get there and to get back.
Now you might say why is it 8 months to get to Mars and a year and a half to come home. And that's all orbital mechanics. We we say we take the short leg out. We want to keep our astronauts.
So we leave Earth, we go into orbit and then we go to Mars. And the minimum we can do today is eight months. And that's the same, you know, you might see our Perseverance rover, our Curiosity rover, I showed in my videos, that's it takes them 8 months to get to Mars. We don't bring them home, but we're going to bring our astronauts home. So, it would take a year and a half. Uh, but if we have advanced technologies, propulsion technologies, maybe we could reduce it in half, the flight time in half. We still want to stay on the surface for up 300 up to 500 days to do our science.
>> Thank you.
Thank you. I see we have a hand up from Mandela.
>> Mandela, do you?
>> Yes. Can you hear me now?
>> Uh, you're very faint. Could you speak louder, please?
>> Can you hear me now?
>> Um, yeah, I think that's a bit better.
So, I I would like to say thank you for your presentation. It was so amazing and I liked it. So my question I have two questions basically. The first one is what what possible things can the astronauts do uh wearing the space suit if they if they arrive on Mars? What what's the advantage of them going to Mars while we can send other robots who can study there and send us informations? And my second question is what did what did you study in the university to to be a space suit designer?
>> Okay, great questions. Yeah, why humans?
It's going to be humans and rovers and robots. We've been studying Mars for 50 years, 50 years, so many decades. We haven't scientifically we want to characterize the atmosphere. We want to know about the the the terrain. We want to know underneath. And so we've been and we've been searching for the question is is there life past or present on Mars? That's the number one science question. And in the report I showed you, we have 11 top science priorities. You can read about Weiss and humans. The first human mission, the very first human mission, we will explore. If we have a really good rover with us, uh a science lab with us, we will surpass the previous 50 years of Mars exploration just on the very first human mission. Again, so it's going to be our humans and our rovers. We're going to keep sending rover missions. We love to explore Mars. But that first human mission, that's how powerful humans are in exploration. You can imagine going out into the wilderness.
Um, you know, exploring uh the mountains, the terrain, uh, even lots of our robots can't even go up or down slopes. They can't go in caves very well. So that's why we have a helicopters on Mars now, too. We said we have to fly. Um, you know, you I studied aerospace engineering, so I love airplanes and spacecraft. And then my graduate degrees I I have a few uh one was in technology and policy. I wanted to know how is my technology going to have societal implications and then another one in aerospace engineering and then by the time I did my doctorate I specialized I kind of a new field. I kind of made it up. It was called aerospace biomedical engineering. So I'm an aerospace engineer but I got a lot of training also in biomedical engineering so that I could design and develop um you know sensors and instruments and measure human performance and so that's I always loved space uh when I was a kid Apollo was was flying and I was very inspired and I didn't even know what an engineer was. I I have a textbook um called somewhere on this bookshelf called interactive aerospace and design.
And I I wrote a textbook for first year college students because when I went to college, I was going to be a lawyer because I didn't even know engineering was a career. No one in my my family were teachers, but you know, not very not I didn't have any they were in the humanities. And so I didn't really know what engineering was. So I kind of had to figure that out in college and decided I love to solve challenging problems. I love to design. I loved kind of a maker. So that's what engineers do.
And so I was really glad when I finally was able to major in in aerospace engineering. But I got a lot of um liberal arts as as well in my undergraduate career and then then I went on to my graduate career.
>> Thank you very much.
>> I see we have a hand raised from Bethot.
Bets, do you mind asking a question please?
I can't hear anything.
>> I can't. Uh, that's a lot. Can you unmute your mic, please?
>> In In the meantime, maybe they can stand by since we can't uh hear them yet. I see something in the chat. I'm not sure if that was a student that we couldn't hear, but in the chat I can I can take a crack at that. Three questions real quick. Um, how do we control the the temperature inside the suit? Great question. Thermal control. There's kind of two two ways to control it through that through the current >> is my voice audible.
>> Yeah, it is now. But hello, could you please hold on for a moment, please?
>> Yeah, hold on. Beta, we'll get back to you. Just real quick in the chat.
>> I don't think she can hear.
>> Hi, Betsler. Can you hear me?
>> Could you just hold on with your question for a moment, please?
>> We'll take your question. We'll take your question shortly.
>> Thank you.
>> Okay, back to back to the question.
>> Okay, go ahead and ask her your question. I think she maybe is having trouble hearing us. Go ahead.
>> Oh, yeah. I had trouble hearing you.
Sorry. Okay. So, my first qu first of all, I want to thank for my uh for this experience and uh I'm so grateful for asking this question in person. So my first question is when we uh when we you said something about thinning the prototypes like when you showed us the prototype of the space suit you are literally lowering the >> Okay. So, >> sorry, Bethl. You're breaking up. We We can't hear you. We losing you halfway.
>> Okay. So, I am Am I audible now?
>> Yes, you are.
>> Okay. So, you showed us the prototype for the uh the outer part of the space suit, right? And you showed us that there are multiple layers for it. And then uh that new prototype that you showed us, the gray one that you put on your arm, and it was like so much thinner. And aren't we like exposing our skin for the space now? Don't you think we're like exposing oursel for the space? Uh other than like aren't we focusing more on movement and reducing the mass other than keeping ourselves space from the safe from the radiation?
And you know you said like small meteorites and something like that. So aren't we like exposing ourselves to the space?
>> Yeah. Um no that's a great question but you have to understand conceptually you can either there's it's pressure pressure production. So that's what uh the bio suit is a pressure layer. That's what the gas pressurized suit does. The current conventional suit. It's a big balloon. So you can either you have two options. You can go inside a balloon.
That's what we've always done. Go inside a balloon and that's pressurizing and it's only a third of an atmosphere.
We're we're having this conversation all at one atmosphere. You you kind of take it for granted because we live in a beautiful life support system here on Earth and that's called one atmosphere and it's 100 101 kilopascals. So the pressure shoot to keep you alive as an astronaut has to apply a third of that.
So the current suit the big gas pressurized suit with the gas you're feeling it's pressurizing you for that 27 kilopascals a third of an atmosphere but it makes it very hard to move. The only other way uh that's physically possible is we can apply that third of an atmosphere directly on your skin. And how I do that is through the bio suit through the materials that we select to squeeze you as well as through the patterning. The patterning allows you to move very nicely. And the material selection then actually apply the pressure directly to the skin. So that's how come it's a second skin suit. Now there's no air, there's no gas. So you're not going to be exposed to it's a vacuum of space. So we have to pressurize you. So that's what the bio suit does. So it does it in a different way. Mechanical counter pressure directly squeezing the skin, squeezing the body with a gas pressurized helmet.
So it's different than a full gas pressurized suit. So hopefully that helps clarify your question a little bit. I I can answer some of the students uh who had on uh that typed their questions. So we were talking about uh thermal control the suit uh basically in the portable life support system and the gas flowing around the helmet in the current suit.
That's how we deal with thermal control.
So we deal with thermal control and uh scrubbing out the carbon dioxide providing you oxygen and as well as keeping it a nice temperature the thermal control. So we do that through the what's called the PL that portable life support system and we'll we'll do the same kind of the same way with the bio suit but we have advantages of new materials that can help kind of wick out wick out the sweat help with your humidity control as well and um the second there's Yep. There's definitely oxygen tanks uh on the on the backpack uh and they're not linked to the spacecraft. They're your own independent. Think about scuba diving.
The the current suit design with that backpack that has an oxygen tank. That's much more like putting on an oxygen tank and kind of going scuba diving. So that's the current design and and that's similar to the design we have in uh the biosuit as well. And you asked a question about radiation. That's a really important question. When we get back to the moon and Mars, radiation is the number one issue we have that might end the mission. It might damage the humans. So, we spend a lot of time now thinking about radiation and that's when I showed you in the video and showed you some of the black threads here. They're advanced as I mentioned uh carbon dope polyethylene and they give partial radiation protection. The best way for radiation protection is to live in a lava tube underneath the surface to be in a pressurized vehicle that's filled with water on the outside because that's that's the best radiation protection we know. We have two kinds of radiation.
galactic cosmic rays. That's what we're going to have on the moon and Mars, as well as solar radiation. So, um, radiation is the kind of most important thing we have to design to keep our astronauts healthy and well. In the suit, I don't want to make it too massive, but we can offer partial radiation protection. We have some new, very new materials. Um, we're testing, it's called boron 10 and aerogels. So, you can look up some very advanced materials. We have some new papers out on incorporating hydrogenated boron 10 with some polyethylene. Those materials hopefully will be integrated uh into threads and we can put those uh on onto the suit.
That would be a big help. And then let me just see reading here quickly. The control moment gyros uh as someone has to produce enough torque. Oh, well they're they're not overcoming the suit stiffness. the the V2 suit that's when you're inside the vehicle. So, you'll just be in your normal clothes. That suit is inside a pressurized uh vehicle or space station.
So, you don't have to overcome the suit stiffness. The control moment gyros are to put as I'm moving my arm here as I'm doing my daily business in space station. The control moment gyros are resisting my motions so that my muscles and bones are working against them. So, think about the V2 suit and the skin suit. The first two that I showed you, think about those as exercise countermeasure suits. Um, so they're used inside inside the existing vehicle.
You don't need to be fighting. They're not going to fight against any pressurization.
>> Okay. Thank you for >> Yeah, of course.
>> My question has been answered. Thank you.
>> Thank you. And then one more. I can get to one more and then I'll have to uh run. One more from the chat. It says the bio suit concept rethinks traditional gas pressurized suit entirely. That's exactly correct. It's a different paradigm. It's a different way kind of that I you know think about revolutionary technology. That's why I included that in my my talk to think about how you can solve a challenge a different way. That's what we did with mechanical counterpressure designs. And the biggest challenge um oh obstacle what do I think is the biggest challenge? Well, we have prototypes. So we have to make a whole engineering prototype. We have to fly it in space and test it. Uh we can simulate you know moon and Mars gravities. Here we simulate them. We fly in an aircraft where we get the parabolic flights. We really have the real environment. So we have to keep doing the research and test test uh to get something ready to go to space. We always you cannot you can't uh sherk on the testing. You have to do a lot of testing. So that's where we're at with the bio suit concepts is test test.
And now we're moving into the portable life support system and trying to improve that design to make that more compact uh lower mass. But I think we'll be in time because we're sending people back in the next few years to the moon and we're not going to go to Mars for the next 1015 years. So I think we have time to hopefully make make a lightweight suit and and fly some of these technologies even if it's a hybrid concept. Some gas pressurized helmet and then maybe some of our advanced um kind of arms and leg designs. That's the goal. Wonderful to see you all. I can send Sean I can send a copy of the slides so that the students have the references if they want to research.
>> Please we really appreciate that. That will obviously be used as you know extra cost learning material. Um doc obviously respecting your time and your schedule.
You've mentioned you've got another class. I just want to take this brief moment to say um we as FASA we actually uh you know um we express our deepest gratitude for your wonderful insightful and deeply inspiring presentation your perspective on advance space of technology I it's truly remarkable because you're thinking outside the box you know what I'm saying it's very revolutionary so I mean it's very captivating motivating and I believe our students educators and uh you know the our wider community here in Africa are beyond inspired so thank you thank Thank you once again for your generosity, sharing your time, your expertise and your experience with us. We s we are sincerely grateful for your support encouragement of the next generation of African space explorers. Uh we'll communicate uh we'll be in touch via email. We'll send a few of the questions because I can see we've got a lot of questions uh in the chat and also on our YouTube link and obviously at your convenience perhaps you can you know share some answers and we'll share them with the students. Once again thank you so much doc. We are deeply humbled to have you and we appreciate your time, Doc.
>> Thank you. You're very welcome.
Wonderful to see you all. Thanks for your attention. Great, great questions.
I'm counting on you all. You're the next generation. If I don't get to go to Mars, it's going to be one of you going to be boots on Mars, the first explorers on Mars. So, yeah. So, keep up the enthusiasm. Study hard. And, uh, it's just amazing. Now, space is kind of available for all of us to to think about because we're going to have many, many, many more people uh, going into space in in the near future. Be well everyone.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you so much Dr. >> B and students, educators. Thank you all for joining us today. It has been an honor and a privilege to be each and every one of you and I'm sure we all enjoy the session. Uh it was truly remarkable. So we are excited and honored to have had Dr. David Newman join us. Uh we are also excited for next week's session. Each week gets closer and closer towards us getting towards our design challenge, our design pro design workshops. So please ensure you join join timelessly. Can I also please ask teachers that you make a list of your of the questions from your students and send it through to us. We have been asking this for a few weeks now and I haven't received any lists from teachers. So please, please, please, this is an opportunity for your students to engage and get answers from professionals in the field. Yes, sure.
We can all go on to chat GPT or co-pilot or Gemini and get answers. But those answers do not come with the years and years and years of experience. Knowledge without experience is not as powerful as knowledge with experience.
AI may suggest something, but it may have already been tried and tested in a lab setting and there could be some genuine feedback that your students could get. So students, I encourage you don't just rely on AI to get your answers. Make use of the professionals, make use of the network that we're providing in terms of sending the questions to your teachers and teachers uh sharing those questions with us and then we can compile it, send it through to the experts and professionals and get those answers back to you. Let's join hands together. Let's learn together.
And by asking questions, you learn. By asking questions, you grow. And by asking questions, you will make full use and gain the full benefit of this program. I want to take the opportunity.
So say Mr. Jacobs, there anything you want to add before I close up?
>> Yes, I just like to advise the students obviously to take notes whenever we do have an expert presenting on the various topics. Um obviously it's all coming together what on the spac suit. So please take notes. These are the notes that you'll be using obviously as you individually uh develop your space suits, your prototypes. I believe it would be very important to incorporate some of the some of the notes that you'll be you know um uh learning from our experts. Like my colleague said, yes, you can use a chat GPT and all these other AI uh you know search engines, but it's always important to incorporate people you know um people that we have that have experience in these various uh you know uh backgrounds. So please uh take notes and use some of those notes when you are designing your space suit. Uh thank you very much for joining us this afternoon and we look forward to hosting you next week and uh please if you can try to join on time. If you can be punctual when joining it actually gives us more time to have you know the question and answer session at the end. So the more punctual you are the more time we have because we do have questions and we can't even uh get to answer all the questions. So please be punctual next week and for the rest of the session.
Thank you very much for joining us and we look forward to hosting you next week.
>> Thank you, Mr. Jacobs. And thank you to everyone for joining us. And once again, Mr. Jacobs, thank you, sir. We salute you as a founder and executive.
It is your over the years that we are able to impact the next generation of African students through programs such as pathways to space. So sir, I say this not likely and I say every week because it is true. We see the growth of the program. We see the impact it's having on the students. So we salute you sir.
you you alone know the price you paid for us to be at this place right now. So sir, thank you Mr. Jacobs. We we we honor you sir. We salute you for your efforts and we want to thank all the educators for putting in the effort each and every week to get your students here to join the sessions on time. We know that your students are better off and their futures are better because of the the efforts and the sacrifice that you put in. So I thank you all for joining today. We are excited. We look forward to next week's session and we'll see you all next week. Have a great week.
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