Montana to Mars: Newman guides NASA effort
Each great adventure story includes a journey. Dava Newman is preparing for perhaps the greatest journey in human history — a manned mission to Mars.
Newman says it with conviction.
Now entering her fourth month as deputy administrator of NASA, the Helena native speaks with the authority of a biomedical engineer who has been briefed by scientists at every major NASA research center in the United States.
“It’s really been fantastic to see what’s going on right now at NASA,” Newman said of her summer-long tour of space agency locals. “It’s given me the best perspective on our space launch system work, everything from the research going on to the International Space Station.”
The diverse life of Montana’s engineer at NASA
A 1982 graduate of Capital High School in Helena, Newman gained national attention during her tenure as professor of aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2007, Time Magazine recognized Newman for her work developing the Bio-Suit, a form-fitting, next-generation spacesuit that is both lighter and more mobile than traditional, gas-pressurized spacesuits.
In October 2014, the Obama administration nominated Newman to fill the No. 2 position at NASA. Six months later, the Senate voted 87-0 to confirm her as deputy administrator.
“It’s an enormous honor to serve at NASA in times when our country is extending humanity’s reach into space while strengthening American leadership here on Earth,” Newman said following her confirmation.
For Newman, the decision to make the journey to Mars is a foregone conclusion. All that remains are the details — and they are daunting.
How do you send a crew of four, along with the millions of pounds of supplies and scientific equipment they will require, across 40 million miles of hostile space environment — and return them safely back to Earth? How do you shield astronauts from high-energy radiation, and mitigate the effects of long-term exposure to zero gravity? What are the psychological implications for humans isolated from Earth and living under crowded conditions for as long as two years?
Skeptics could argue that such a journey remains beyond human grasp; a flight of fantasy better suited to the literary imaginations of Jules Verne or Robert Heinlein than genuine earth-bound science.
Newman does not dismiss the challenges but is solid in her conviction that a mission to Mars can and will be done — perhaps within the next 20 years.
“It’s important to remember we are already at Mars, with five rovers, landers and orbiters,” she points out. “Great science is being done at Mars every single day.”
In fact, the mission to Mars began more than half a century ago.
Mariner 4 took the first close proximity photographs of the red planet in 1965 (one year after Newman was born). Since then, 11 additional NASA spacecraft have made the journey to Mars — and for more than three years now the NASA rover “Curiosity” has been prowling the planet’s surface, faithfully beaming back a stream photographs and data from the Martian surface.
While sending robotic probes to Mars is well established, landing humans there will prove to be far more difficult.
“It starts right at the International Space Station,” Newman said.
The first components of the International Space Station were launched into low Earth orbit in 1998. It has now been continuously occupied for nearly 15 years.
“It is our world-class laboratory, with many international partners,” Newman said. “There are six astronauts there today.”
The 45th expedition to the ISS arrived Sept. 4. “The current crew aboard the International Space Station consists of two NASA astronauts, three Russian cosmonauts, and one Japanese astronaut. This group includes mission commander Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko.”
Both Kelly and Kornienko are now midway through a yearlong stay aboard the ISS, conducting a mission intended to test the long-term effects of weightlessness on the human body.
“The second phase of our journey to Mars is beyond low-Earth orbit,” Newman said. “What we call ‘the proving ground.’ We’ve already started way down that path. We’re already building and testing a Space Launch System (SLS) that has the Orion capsule on top.”
In just three years, NASA plans to begin unmanned test flights of its new Space Launch System, powered by the most powerful rocket engines ever built.
Standing more than 200 feet tall, the SLS will be topped by the Orion spacecraft, designed to carry a crew of four into deep space. On Dec. 5, 2014, NASA launched Orion for the first time.
During the four-hour unmanned flight, Orion reached an altitude of roughly 3,600 miles above the Earth’s surface — 15 times deeper into space than the International Space Station.
“Into the decade of the 2020s, we will begin taking people into ‘cis-lunar space,’” Newman said. “That’s basically into an earth/moon orbit, way beyond the space station.”
This ‘cis-lunar’ phase of development (basically an orbit linking both the Earth and moon) is where astronauts and engineers will begin to cut the umbilical cord connecting man to Earth.
Since the genesis of the space program, astronauts have depended on Earth for resupply and operational support. Missions aboard spacecraft like Apollo or the space shuttle lasted only days or weeks, and crews aboard the International Space Station can return to Earth in a matter of hours in the case of an emergency. All these missions are referred to as being “earth reliant.”
A human mission to and from Mars could last 500 days or longer, including six to nine months of transit each way. To be successful, these missions will need to be “Earth independent.”
Resupply, assembly and staging will all take place in space while separated from Earth by a human transit time of nine to 11 days.
In 2025, NASA engineers are planning for a dramatic test of man’s earth independence: a robotic mission to land on an asteroid, capture a multi-ton boulder, transport and release that boulder into a stable orbit around the moon, and send astronauts there to return samples of it to Earth.
This Asteroid Redirect Mission will greatly advance NASA’s human path to Mars, testing the technological capabilities needed for future crewed missions to the red planet.
All this is merely an opening for the final act: a manned mission to Mars.
“In the 2030s comes the third phase,” Newman said. “That’s when we’ll be in the vicinity of Mars.”
“If we use standard chemical propulsion technology … it’s about a two-year round trip,” she continued. “You could probably go there in about six months, and come back in a year and a half. It depends on which year and how Earth and Mars are lined up.”
The journey to Mars will require a whole new generation of technology. A major hurdle will be lifting the shear mass of materials necessary to supply a two-year, deep-space mission.
Engineers estimate a four-person crew will require more than 2 million pounds of equipment and supplies to make the round-trip journey. The space shuttle could lift about 50,000 pounds, so it would have taken approximately 40 shuttle launches just to get all the supplies needed for a trip to Mars into space.
Even with the additional payload capacity of a new generation of more powerful rocket engines, it likely will take several years to position everything into a stable low-Earth orbit. Much of work assembling and preparing for the mission will have to be done in space.
Engineers also are working to develop a radically new means of propelling large masses across long distances through the weightlessness of space called “Solar Electric Propulsion.”
Current thermal rocket technology has the disadvantage of requiring large quantities of solid or liquid fuels to generate the thrust necessary to propel a spacecraft forward. Solar Electric Propulsion, by comparison, uses the energy of the sun collected in large on-board solar arrays to create an ion (charged particle) beam thrust.
The system is slow to accelerate. Analysts have compared it to a car engine that takes two days to accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour, but it is far more efficient than conventional chemical/thermal rocket engines, requiring only one-tenth of the fuel to deliver comparable masses.
“It’s not great for humans, but it’s wonderful technology for infrastructure,” Newman said. “Once we make this big jump to ion propulsion in the 2030s, it will be great for moving cargo and heavy masses out into space.”
The planning and technology to put a man on Mars is being developed now, but much of the work to refine and develop it will be left to generations now in school. In addition to her scientific research, Newman has long worked to encourage young people to enter fields of science and technology.
“At NASA, my portfolio starts with exploration, and specifically our journey to Mars,” she said, “but also education and outreach. I couldn’t be more passionate or more keen in terms of education at all levels; K-12, universities, post-doctoral research, you name it.”
“Exploration is about the coolest thing going,” she added. “Space and NASA is for everyone, and we need all the big dreams in the world to help us get to Mars.”