How to create a space suit | Dava Newman

hello Ted women I have the world's greatest job I am a rocket scientist great at cocktail parties as an aerospace biomedical engineer I get to solve really challenging problems whether it's by space or sea it's really about the human condition how do humans perform so we learn through studying in isolated confined environments studying people performance and let me bring it back home from space back to earth what have we learned a spacesuit is the world's smallest spacecraft spacesuit equals spacecraft show you smiley Apollo bloopers you probably haven't seen these before the world's you know greatest spacesuit for 40 year old technology no okay it has limited mobility but you're gonna pressurize cans fantastic pressurizes you gives you your oxygen scrubs your carbon dioxide a little micrometeorite protection helps little radiation but we can do better our dream is to invent the world's coolest spacesuit for Mars boat need a little bit help I want to take you on a journey from Earth to Mars and show you three suits this is called our gravity loading countermeasure suit astronauts in space have a significant musculoskeletal loss you're gonna lose about 40 percent of your muscle strength that's the good news one to two percent of your bone mineral density your skeletal integrity now who wants to go on my four-year Mars mission how about six months to Space Station so our gravity loading countermeasure suit is for inside the vehicle inside Space Station and it's an exercise suit okay it's better than lifting big power weights right we dial in the tension of the elasticity from your shoulders down to your soles to recreate one body loading as you're pushing around and flying around but we even more passionate about the earth applications this young gentleman has cerebral palsy so we dream about inventing an enhanced locomotor suit for him to increase his muscle tone his stepping ability just so he can do daily activities just enjoy life so is pretty inspiring trust that's what keeps us going we'll be flying this blue suit to the International Space Station in 2015 with dr. James wall D of Australia the European Space Agency my lab King's College London just call us a design team from the UN the second suit the conventional space suit gas pressurized about 140 kilos that's pushed in 300 pounds not too bad for weightlessness but boy is it injuring our crew it's about 25 major shoulder surgeries recently from this capability well how can we help solve that problem well we can invent a suit within a suit because I can't get rid of gravity here so I go in there water and train at the NASA neutral buoyancy laboratory but guess what I sink right to the bottom of the suit so I'm practicing and practicing because I have to get it perfect for spaceflight but my shoulders and my muscles are rubbing on that side bearing it's just a fancy word and spacesuit design for the shoulder bearing so how can we alleviate that with our great designers love of my life my partner gave trotty leads to design can we come up with a suit within a suit protect those astronauts and my doctoral student Ellie Anderson yes we can we have a wearable octopus octopus suit pressure sensing so for the first time we're gonna measure human motion within the suit how are the astronauts moving within the suit we can quantify that and then we design the protection to just keep them healthy and well and let them do their tasks as best they can it has space applications we're pretty excited about the other applications as well biomedical athletic and play just like Jessica and all these heroines on the stage before you today why play literally play we play it as a musical suit and why because it inspires us it's fun for engineers we're not geeky and you're just come on you know we have fun play a little bit of music I love these tracks so we have fun and mostly because that's how we create and that's when we're at our best that takes me to my third suit another bio suit and Deborah's gonna come on out here thank you for helping me out Deborah's gonna come right out here in my bio suit for Mars Thank You someone to tell you a little bit about this suit it's not a gas pressurized 140 kilo system mm-hmm know what I'm gonna shrink wrap you okay how are we gonna do that so we're gonna put the pressure directly on your skin now I have to provide 30% of an atmosphere 30 kilo Pascal's 1/3 of an atmosphere keeps you alive in the vacuum of space so can we do it are we up to the challenge we think so and I want to give you maximum mobility okay because Mars is tough why we going to Mars to search for the evidence of life okay past life four billion years ago but still it would rewrite all the scientific books if we have the evidence of past life in our solar system so that's what we want to explore Mars a little challenging Valles Marineris now that's the Grand Canyon of the solar system ten times longer than the Grand Canyon on the US the mountains yeah they're big Olympus Mons three times higher than Everest at 25 kilometers so is she up to it to be a Martian extreme Explorer I think so she can move she can bend it's pretty comfortable this is the pressure layer remember we're applying a pressure this is a mock-up the engineering prototypes of course have to apply all the pressure she'd be a little too snug if we put on the real prototype and how to wear it for two hours with us so what's the what's the design behind this first in the materials we can get about 20% of the atmosphere again we need 30% that's the design go get about 20% with passive elastic material that's kind of the white you're looking at shrink wrapper a little bit we get almost all the way there but we need something else active materials so my doctoral student Brad whole shoe is coming up with some great work shape-memory alloys you might know about him or a nickel hi there nickel titanium people like to call them muscle wires they're pretty cool so we need to shrink wrap a little bit more so this is just a mock-up of course but zip you push down there all right now I'm getting a couple extra centimeters there so I can go from my 20 kilo pascals 30 kilo pascals voila we have enough pressure and we've just demonstrated enough pressure production with our active materials but I still want her to be as mobile as possible you saw those Apollo bloopers great technology for 40 years ago we haven't improved much on the gas pressurized suits so we can do better how can we do better inspired by uber all's early work on patterning geometry if you want to move around very flexible you've been patient sitting with us all morning move around a little bit and if I drew circles all over your arms and legs what would happen to those circles like in my animation the circle would turn elliptical and those two red lines they're very special those are bisecting diameters from the circle to the ellipse they stay on both surfaces and they only pivot they only rotate they do not extend those are called the lines of non extension so we throw a little math out at three dimensional eigen vector analysis voila the Spider Man suit that's the pattern of the black lines and the embedded gold line just see here this elegant math engineering know-how designs a wonderful aesthetic solution to give us maximum mobility and requires minimum energy expenditure I want all of your energy to go into exploring Mars not wasted in overcoming this big pressurized bulky suit so we dream we dream big we want to enable humans we dream of superhuman performance I dream of a world without without with no disability let's just get rid of it no one should have a disability only ability we need to celebrate the ability of humans because we can all perform and we need to enhance it people need a little help my Martian astronauts will need a little help when they get to the surface because of all that muscle bone loss so we dream of superhuman capability we work on it inspires us every day we're very inspired by exploration by thinking about helping humanity just one kid at a time and then onward to though my love and passion of design and engineering so final image and that I'd like to show you is oh one one thing about this the helmet which we can display here second to final image what's the day in the life of the Martian astronaut gonna be like you saw those mountains you have to go up and what you have to do but we need to embed very interesting but complicated IT systems the IT system you put on that helmet put on your Google glass wish you good with goggle vest has to be very enhanced version because we need to write our own code for it we have the code we just can't import it how how much well we're getting there remember you ready for the next reason how how much oxygen do I have left Oh 60% David good good keep going my Rovers my robots are all with me on this journey I'm gonna go down the slope bring up a three-dimensional enhanced vision whoa what's that slope mmm 20 degrees okay I can do that don't send the rover's down that's 30 degrees right there so we're all a team exploration is always a team that you heard Diana say so eloquently so the last image I leave you with is earth spaceship earth as coined by Buckminster Fuller it's important for all of our research to reflect down on the earth spaceship earth if I take earth and shrink it to the size of a basketball our life-support system our atmosphere is three human hairs thick as you see here so the inspiration to take our work back down to earth and we're all stewards of this planet please enjoy the view of the Southern Lights taken from Space Station the astronauts are there in the 90 minutes we've had these talks of all my heroines inspiring me they've already circumnavigated earth that's how long it takes and here's the image they show you [Music] thank you and thank to Deborah [Applause]

Channel: TED Archive

Views: 27,845

Rating: 4.7884297 out of 5

Keywords: TED, Archive

Id: lZvP_URAjmM

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 29 2017