Mars is not Plan B: Dava Newman on spacesuits, autonomy, and Spaceship Earth

Lex Fridman had about forty minutes with Dava Newman, the Apollo Program Professor at MIT, former deputy administrator of NASA, and principal investigator on four spaceflight missions. She designs spacesuits, studies human performance in odd gravity, and has herself circumnavigated the globe by sail. In true engineering style she told him she talks fast: pick the best questions, let’s get it done.

He opened with Ferdinand Magellan’s crew, the first to sail around the world. Magellan himself died partway through, and 242 of the 260 sailors died on the three-year voyage. Fridman asked whether those people left port filled with fear or excitement. Newman said probably not fear. In all exploration, she argued, the real protagonists are the challenge and the unknown. She would guess they felt wonderment.

What she lingered on was the human system on the ship. Without a three-dimensional map of the globe, Magellan’s sailors were looking over the horizon and asking what was there. Team dynamics and leadership had to carry the mission. How do you keep people focused when the weather is extreme and home is gone? That question, she said, echoes straight into spaceflight.

For a Mars mission the technology list is long, but Newman specializes in keeping astronauts alive, and she puts psycho-social issues, team dynamics, and leadership in the top three challenges of any isolated, confined, extreme environment. “We’re all people,” she said. Five hundred years later, the hard part is still the crew.

Newman’s Twitter handle is built around the word explorer, and Fridman asked when she first fell in love with the idea. As far back as she can remember. She grew up in Helena, Montana, with the Rocky Mountains in the backyard, climbing, looking at caves, running around in nature. Exploration, for her, is not a domain. Walking into woods you have not seen counts the same way going to the Moon does.

Space arrived on a specific night. She was five years old during Apollo 11, and she still remembers the humanity of it: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins left in lunar orbit. Three men doing something that had seemed impossible a decade earlier, even a year earlier. She probably did not know their names at the time. She kept the picture.

The Apollo program, she said, taught her to dream: any impossible mission could be possible with enough focus. You need some luck. You definitely need leadership and a mission that stays locked on target. From then on it seemed obvious that people should be interplanetary as well as Earthbound. Before a man stood on the Moon, it had not been obvious at all.

Newman likes the pale-blue-dot view. She often opens public talks with a Hubble deep-field image, because it is important to know we are a small speck and, so far, on the best planet we know. Her own research started in what she calls mission worlds: when will we find life? Her timeline is optimistic. In the next decade, she thinks we will probably have evidence of past life on Mars.

Past, not present. She is more comfortable saying life was there about 3.5 billion years ago, when Mars still had an electromagnetic shield and an atmosphere and a pleasant 0.38 g. Everyone, she joked, will be able to slam-dunk a basketball. Today the building blocks are showing up: organics, polar ice, even seasonal water. The catch is radiation. Anything on the surface has been cooked, so the search has to go down into the soil. Current bugs she leaves as a possibility. Fossilized life she treats as close to a lock.

Beyond Mars she is impatient for the ocean worlds, icy moons with liquid water under the crust. The search rule is simple: follow the water, look for carbon-based chemistry, because that is the only life we know how to hunt. Other biochemistries may exist. They are hard to search for, she said, because we would not know what we were looking at.

Robots have been at Mars for fifty years and still have not closed the question. Humans plus rovers would accelerate it, but Mars is an eight-month outbound, year-and-a-half homebound kind of extreme. Meanwhile Kepler has confirmed on the order of 6,000 exoplanets, including a couple of dozen rocky worlds in the Goldilocks zone. They are ten to a hundred light-years away. Scientifically they look habitable. Engineering cannot reach them. She cannot believe we are the only ones, intelligent life included, but the speed of light is a hard limit. No warp drive. Cutting the Mars trip from eight months to three or four would be a huge gift to crew safety. That takes propulsion, and maybe physics we have not written down yet. Until then, orbital mechanics still rules.

Newman was deputy administrator of NASA in the Obama years, so Fridman asked what she makes of Artemis. She loves the Moon program. Forty years in low Earth orbit is enough; it is time to go back to deep space. There is a lot to do on the Moon, and a warning attached: she hopes we do not get stuck there for fifty years. Spend the next decade first with landers, then with people, then keep moving.

The Moon is only three days away, which makes it the right place to buy down risk. Habitats, life support, and new suits have to be learned off planet, and low Earth orbit at 400 kilometers is still only a Boston-to-New-York hop. Deep space brings radiation that LEO does not. The horizon goal is people on Mars. Nobody goes tomorrow. She wants a decade of lunar investment so that astronauts are healthy, safe, and practiced before the long trip.

In-situ resource utilization is the other reason. The South Pole, near Shackleton Crater, pairs permanently shadowed ice with nearby sunlit terrain. You go where the water is, because water is fuel and life support. You do not haul all the mass from Earth. You learn to 3D-print from local material, stand up a pressure shell, and live off the land. A lunar day is twenty-eight Earth days, fourteen of light and fourteen of dark, so she expects week- to month-long tours, not permanent settlement. Earthrise from the Moon is one of the great views in the solar system. Most people will still want to come home.

The word *people* is doing new work. While she was at NASA, the law was changed so that astronaut is no longer a title reserved for government employees. Cross a hundred kilometers, fly orbit, and you are an astronaut, including private citizens. She would give the Moon a shot herself. Getting the next generation to Mars is her life’s work, and she expects that to be her students’ generation, not hers.

Since Apollo and the Saturn V, the United States has not had heavy-lift launch. Newman, sitting as the Apollo Program Professor, currently has zero of it. That is about to change on three tracks at once: NASA’s Space Launch System, SpaceX’s heavy vehicle, and Blue Origin coming along behind. From where she sits, that is fantastic.

Her view of SpaceX is not tribal. The company’s money, she reminded Fridman, is government money: NASA and U.S. Air Force funding, as it should be, because the government is betting on a firm that moves fast. SpaceX is no longer a startup. It has had accidents, learned expensive lessons, and still changes the tempo. Private industry will take more risk than a public agency. That is useful.

The best arrangement is both cultures at once. Human spaceflight still needs the safety and quality-assurance lessons NASA paid for in blood. Government agencies, NASA or ESA, also become bureaucratic, risk-averse, and slow. Industry has to push. As deputy administrator she even gave an award inside NASA for failing smart, a small wedge against a culture that only knew how not to fail. Cost and flight rate have to move. Recovering a first stage, she said, can save about 70 percent. The space shuttle was reusable and, to an aerospace engineer, still the most elegant vehicle ever flown; it just was not affordable. Watching a booster stick a landing never gets old. She called it gymnastics for rocket ships, and the game-changer of a cheaper, higher-frequency era.

Launch is only half of the opening. The science you can now fly on a CubeSat used to be a student conceive-design-implement project. Today advanced instruments ride on something you can cup in both hands. Newman measures them in units: 1U is that handful, 3U if you have more money and payload, roughly a shoe box. Smallsats might weigh 100 to 200 kilograms. CubeSats are the next step down, kilos to tens of kilos, stacked like building blocks.

The company Planet is the example she reaches for: a flock of CubeSats looking down, covering the entire Earth every twenty-four hours. Climate, a changing surface, Earth observation that used to require a few-hundred-million-dollar spacecraft now rides on a cheap modular swarm. Telecom is on the same curve. The expensive birds that stand behind cell phones and GPS are being undercut by lots of small modular ones. Every nation, she said, can fly a CubeSat. That is the democratization of spaceflight.

If Newman has anything to say about the suit of the future, it will be very tight-fitting. Mechanical counterpressure, applied directly to the skin, looks technically feasible. Her lab is still in research and development; there is no flight system. The patents sit in the patterning: how you apply that pressure evenly so a person can live in it.

Step back, she said, and the definition is almost too clean: the spacesuit is the world’s smallest spacecraft. You take every life-support system, oxygen, carbon-dioxide scrubbing, pressure, thermal control, humidity, communications, a little radiation protection, and shrink it around a person. The suits that have flown are engineering marvels. They also mass about 140 kilograms, and they are gas balloons. Mobility is terrible. Apollo crews bunny-hopped because they could not really bend a knee.

Moon and Mars need a planetary mobility suit, so her group flipped the design paradigm. Instead of wrapping a tiny spacecraft around a human, they measure how people move, model that motion, and ask whether a suit can grow from the skin out. The body only needs about a third of an atmosphere, roughly 30 kilopascals or 4.3 psi. At sea level we live at one atmosphere, most of it nitrogen. Apply that third evenly and continuously, and a person is alive and happy. Apply it unevenly, and you get bruising. The hard problem is uniformity at the joints.

Do it right and the mass could drop by an order of magnitude, with full arm-and-leg flexibility. She wants explorers who move like Olympic athletes, spending energy on the work rather than fighting the garment. Feasible, she is careful to say, is not the same as flight-ready. Those two words are years apart.

Fridman asked the joke version: if the body is shrink-wrapped, do you wrap the head too, Blue Man Group style? Newman said no. There is no benefit to shrink-wrapping a skull. The helmet stays gas-pressurized, and in the architecture she wants, it becomes the explorer’s information portal. Augmented reality for maps and topography. Cameras good enough to read lunar regolith. If it is really good, a little laboratory in the visor, so you can ask what a rock is made of, and whether it holds water, without calling Houston for permission to pick it up.

The suit is also a design object. Her teams are not only engineering students. They include design students, architects, industrial designers, and people from athletic performance. Colors, aesthetics, and materials are on the agenda because you are dressed in the thing for hours in an extreme environment. Her partner comes from architecture and industrial design; they work the problem together. A garment built only by engineers, she implied, is usually a bad thing to wear. On Mars you are not going there to sit inside the lander. You are going to look for evidence of life, which means mobility, plus rovers and robots. Exploration, for her, is always a suite: some of the explorers are human, many are machines.

Fridman brought up HAL 9000 from *2001: A Space Odyssey*, the machine that put the mission above the crew. Did HAL do the right thing? Newman would not grade the movie. She pulled the question into engineering. For Mars, the reality is a twenty-minute communications lag. There will not be a mission control on Earth in any useful sense. Systems have to be fully autonomous. People have to be fully autonomous too. That, she said, is the most important concept in the architecture.

The Moon is again the right dress rehearsal: a three-second lag is short enough to save you and long enough to show where autonomy breaks. Magellan’s crew left port and were on their own, using whatever they found on land, which is just in-situ resource utilization with older vocabulary. Five centuries later, deep-space crews return to that condition. Humans stay in the loop, she added, by design. They may be on Earth, in Mars orbit, or in the lander. The machines will still be designed by people. Robust autonomy of the kind required is on the drawing boards, not on the pad.

Where she wants AI this decade is not on Mars. NASA already holds petabytes of Earth observations: climate, oceans, land, air. Supercomputers can grind the numbers. AI’s job, in her word, is curating that data, turning it into something people can see and act on. Then comes the hard part, which is not technical. After the data, the analysis, and the visualization, you still have to change human behavior. She called the next decade urgent. Take care of Spaceship Earth first.

Fridman asked the darker question: can the species survive if it does not become interplanetary in the next century or two? Newman’s answer was immediate. Absolutely. She does not think Mars is option B. Saving Spaceship Earth and humanity is the work. Put simply, Earth does not need us, but we really need Earth.

The planet was here long before we arrived and will be here long after. The question is how we live with other living beings, in something closer to balance, because right now we are not. That is the urgency, and she put it on this decade: live more sustainably, realize we are in one blue bubble together. The good news, as she framed it, is that everyone already wants to be an astronaut. We are all astronauts on Spaceship Earth, and taking care of the planet is the mission.

Asked to sketch the next hundred and fifty to two hundred years, Newman stayed optimistic. Low Earth orbit becomes a place: thousands of people, tens of thousands, who knows, maybe millions, with industry and manufacturing and tourism. The Moon holds visitors and some residents, three days from home, with a view that is hard to beat. Most people will still want to come back. As a species we will be interplanetary, which for her means the Moon and Mars. Venus is already a runaway greenhouse and a science target, not a home. Jupiter and the rest of the outer system she assigns to probes. We will live there in our minds, on the images and data, not in our bodies.

On the nearer clock, she is doing everything she can to put a person on Mars in the 2030s. First the Moon, around 2025 to 2035, starting with a few astronauts and an international crew, then a decade of lunar know-how. Later in the 2030s, if the technology is in hand, the human Mars mission. She thanked Fridman, said it was her pleasure, and left the forty minutes as dense as they had been advertised.